hipadev23 (u/hipadev23)

hipadev23 commented on The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE wired.com/story/elon-musk... · Posted by u/medler

tptacek · a year ago

That would create a different forum. HN is an experiment in how long this kind of forum can ward off gravitational collapse. There are things fundamentally wrong with these kinds of forums, but that's true of every kind of forum.

hipadev23 · a year ago

Very well then. I’m going to create a better product to accelerate that gravitational collapse.

See some of you on the other side but it won’t be here. I’m out.

hipadev23 commented on The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE wired.com/story/elon-musk... · Posted by u/medler

computerthings · a year ago

These aren't "political winds". This is all a bit too much "we're all looking for the guy who did this", when it comes to Y Combinator and "tech bros" in general.

> Balaji then revealed his shocking ideas for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray t-shirts. “And if you see another Gray on the street … you do the nod,” he said, during a four-hour talk on the Moment of Zen podcast. “You’re a fellow Gray.”

> The Grays’ shirts would feature “Bitcoin or Elon or other kinds of logos … Y Combinator is a good one for the city of San Francisco in particular.” Grays would also receive special ID cards providing access to exclusive, Gray-controlled sectors of the city. In addition, the Grays would make an alliance with the police department, funding weekly “policeman’s banquets” to win them over.

-- https://newrepublic.com/article/180487/balaji-srinivasan-net...

That HN is for stuff not discussed in the news is basically disproven daily. The other thing I keep hearing that "if we allow this, the front page would be only about politics", I don't believe it anymore. It's like the stone that keeps tigers away. People may genuinely believe in that stone and that they're guarding the village, but I think it's bull and having to entertain this superstition takes up more resources than the occasional tiger attack would.

I know disabling flags is probably not feasible, since real spam does get posted. but we have "showdead" for comments, why can't we simply have the same option for threads? Then those who want to discuss these things can do it, at the price of also having to wade through actual spam. Anybody else would be unaffected. If the goal is not to suppress awareness and discussion, that can be very easily proven with such a feature, and the best time to implement it would have been a long time ago IMO.

hipadev23 · a year ago

Votes are a far bigger problem than flagging because it takes a pavlovian approach to what ideas are allowed. Flagging is important to remove spam and wholly inappropriate content. And if you revoke the ability of users who flag content based on a personal disagreement, that user simply loses that ability.

hipadev23 commented on The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE wired.com/story/elon-musk... · Posted by u/medler

tptacek · a year ago

That would be a disaster of epic proportions. Every thread, no matter how innocuous the topic, would devolve into perpetual feuds about which kinds of people were upvoting and downvoting which other kinds. These sorts of shitstorms were pretty common on HN, in the long-long-ago, and even then all we were revealing were comment scores, not voting attribution.

hipadev23 · a year ago

Then we remove upvotes and downvote entirely. Web2.0 online discourse (visibility is controlled by recommendation algos keyed on upvotes/downvotes) is fundamentally broken.

hipadev23 commented on The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE wired.com/story/elon-musk... · Posted by u/medler

dang · a year ago

That's just not an accurate description of HN based on what I know, but of course it's indeed possible that I'm too embedded to see clearly.

Edit: some of these points can be refuted by data though (albeit not public data, which means people have to take our word for it, which many are understandably reluctant to do). For example, flaggers of these stories are by and large longstanding community members who have participated for years on HN in lots of threads about lots of topics, etc. That doesn't prove they're not flagging at the behest of outside groups, but it does make it unlikely.

hipadev23 · a year ago

Make it public. Upvotes/downvotes/flagging should have usernames attached to it.

hipadev23 commented on The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE wired.com/story/elon-musk... · Posted by u/medler

dang · a year ago

That's not an accurate description of what's happening, and we're not going to redesign the site in response to political winds, gale-force though they are right now. Actually that would be the worst moment to do that.

hipadev23 · a year ago

It 100% absolutely is, you're just too deep to recognize it.

It's what's happened across Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook over the past decade. You've all built platforms intended for social discourse but instead built extremely brittle systems subject to gamified manipulation by showing people which opinions reward and punish them. And those are then manipulated at-large by outside groups responsible for elevating a particular way of thinking about a given topic.

Conversations do not need a algorithmic popularity mechanism.

hipadev23 commented on The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE wired.com/story/elon-musk... · Posted by u/medler

dang · a year ago

You can cherry-pick any two data points like that to make any point you want, all equally unfounded, so the only thing a comment like this actually does is restate your existing preference.

Edit: or perhaps one could say restate-and-reinforce. I think that's (edit: well, might be) largely the function of adding snark and indignation to internet comments.

hipadev23 · a year ago

I think you need to admit HN is failing due to how easy it is to manipulate what content and comments are shown. Allows a single determined group to literally control the narrative. Eliminate upvotes/downvotes. Keep flagging but make it public record. And revoke privileges for those who abuse it.

hipadev23 commented on The Dumbest Trade War Fallout Begins wsj.com/opinion/the-trump... · Posted by u/SirLJ

tombert · a year ago

I don't want to dickride too much, but I feel like HN is decidedly less awful than most other discussion boards, in no small part because it has decent moderation.

I do think that sometimes they're a bit too quick to flag something purely because it can be deemed "political", but for the most part I think that HN's moderation has been ok.

hipadev23 · a year ago

> > I feel like HN is decidedly less awful than most other discussion boards

I agree, but that's unfortunately a very low bar these days.

If we got rid of upvotes/downvotes (keep flagging privileges, but make it public record, and abuse-it-you-lose-it) the variety of thought and ideas on HN would 100x overnight.

hipadev23 commented on Introducing deep research openai.com/index/introduc... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

therealmarv · a year ago

I don't know. OpenAI is so bad in naming... the average person on the street will confuse Deepseek with Deep Research. Also not to forget o1, o3 ... 4o

hipadev23 · a year ago

Yes.

hipadev23 commented on CDC: Unpublished manuscripts mentioning certain topics must be pulled or revised insidemedicine.substack.c... · Posted by u/KittenInABox

WarOnPrivacy · a year ago

> But that's why I said nazi bar. It doesn't mean everyone.

Doesn't nazi bar refer to a bar full of nazis?

hipadev23 · a year ago

No, it doesn't.