Comment by djjeoeje | Hacker News Reader

Comment by djjeoeje | Hacker News Reader

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Discussion here is controlled by pro government forces, if you speak out here you've already lost.

Case in point, auto dead comment:

Yet again someone will come here to give an apologia for the government, yet again people will shrug and throw up their hands, yet again people will complain yet do nothing, and next time someone points out how corrupt the government is those same people will argue that the government is good, the government can be trusted... It just goes on and on and the oppressive society will only tighten it's grip on power.

What will you do? HN and HN mods are cheerleaders for the government, posts, like this one, are flagged and voted down or never appear in the first place -- oh this throw away green account, its just a troll, no one needs to water their time reading, only a loon doesn't trust the government.

All the time we have threads congratulating people for working for the government, for helping Obama care not be a wreck, for modernizing the beaucratic nightmare, help the oplressive government become better and morw efficient, they obviously can be trusted.

Everyone here does nothing, snd the few who speak out are silenced. You accept the tyranny before you and laugh at those who resist.

> Discussion here is controlled by pro government forces

For the record, I very often see criticism of the U.S., U.K., and many other governments on HN. I see it so much that I have no problem stating unambiguously: The above statement is false.

I would expect your post to be voted down because it clearly violates HN guidelines.

Seems like the above comment complies with HN guidelines, unless you believe they are 'baiting', but they seem to be arguing that there is a systematic bias, which is a legitimate point to bring up. I see posts about race, gender, and sexuality discrimination all the time, and think a post about viewpoint discrimination is equally legitimate.

It breaks the guidelines by calling names and ranting.

It's not clear.

I thought that was just me. It has seemed like posts critical of government policy can disappear quickly, but I don't have a comprehensive feel for how posts move on HN so it was only ever a feeling.

How can we collect data on the mobility of posts?

I've wondered this on Facebook too. Post something about a robot I made and people love it. Post something about US weapons killing children in Yemen and no one reacts or comments.

How much of that is the fact that people just don't respond well to those things and how much of that is the algorithm hiding the post for some reason?

How can we monitor moderated sites like this? What are the metrics we could collect?

There's a couple different HN APIs you can use to analyze some of the data:

- https://github.com/HackerNews/API

- https://hn.algolia.com/api

I've noticed the exact same thing. Posts critical of gov are either flagged or they drop to page 4 or 5 with 50+ upvotes in an hour.

Then there are posts that get into top 10 position with only 4 upvotes in an hour.

Weird. Someone is definitely pushing an agenda.

It depends on user action. User flags affect submission rankings even before the [flagged] tag appears. There's also a "overheated discussion detector" algorithm that can also depress the rankings of a submission. I think ranking may also be improved depending on the rate of upvotes (besides just quantity), e.g., if a submission gets 4 up-votes in an hour it'll have a higher rank that receiving 4 up-votes over 4 hours.

Mods can add weight to a submission as well, but from what I've seen of their public behavior on the site, I suspect they're not using such weight very often.

>I think ranking may also be improved depending on the rate of upvotes (besides just quantity), e.g., if a submission gets 4 up-votes in an hour it'll have a higher rank that receiving 4 up-votes over 4 hours.

Sure, that's true but go to new submissions page and look at the posts that got 4 votes in 15 minutes. None of them are on the front page let alone in the top 10.

I believe it also has to do with the context of activity of other submissions. Compare the activity of those submissions with the others on the top page.

If you believe someone is pushing an agenda, please be explicit about what you mean. Who is it? What agenda are they pushing? Hand-waving vague accusations sound like vague conspiracies: it's "them"! The nefarious "they"!

Edit to add: From what I've send there is one agenda that is being pushed: keep the community healthy. Try to keep flame wars, off-topic, and other non-constructive discussion to a minimum. If that happens to conflict with what you'd like to see on HN, then likely yes, there is something nefarious going on.

I'm not saying it's nefarious but mods quite often push a story up on the front page with only few votes. I've witnessed it about a dozen times. And given that it happens, they definitely want some stories to be seen. By the definition, that is an agenda -- nefarious or not.

Who is they? What is their agenda? Give me examples! Stacktrace or GTFO! :)

> HN mods are cheerleaders for the government

Well that's a surreal one. I'd be shocked, though morbidly interested, if you could find even a single comment of the 16k or so we've posted that merits such a description.

What you're really describing, shorn of hyperbole and wake-up-sheeple indignation, is that the HN community is divided and there are lot of users here who just don't agree with you. That's no reason to fulminate. Please don't fulminate here.

I share your frustration about these developments, but I don't share your perception that people on HN as a whole cheerlead for the government this way. I've seen huge amounts of animosity and opposition here toward government surveillance and other expressions of government power -- often upvoted, not downvoted -- and lots of people also saying how they feel sad, angry, or helpless at some of these developments.

HN as a whole? No. But I have frequently seen pro-surveillance comments highly placed and more than a few politely spoken criticisms flagged.

This perspective may be biased by what actions are more memorable-- someone saying something I agree with in a way I've heard before isn't very memorable. But a top contributor aggressively apologizing for absurd government overreach and attacking whistle-blowers for months at a time is very memorable.

At the end of the day the extreme levels of government overreach -- the industrial scale levels of unlawful surveillance, the multitude of improperly handled security vulnerabilities, and so on-- requires that the tech industry be complicit in this unlawful and unethical conduct at least to an extent.

I've found it much more comfortable commiserating with civil rights activists who are _not_ involved with technology than talking to audience like the one here at HN-- at least with people outside the tech industry I don't have to worry that the person I'm talking to has a day job building information weapons which are being recklessly deployed against the public.

BTW, the comment you're responding to has now itself been hidden.

You, and the commenter voted into oblivion below, are blamers. If one perceives a loss of control around having a "free" existence, the easiest thing to do for resolve is to blame someone else for a) taking one's external controls away and/or b) "observe" someone else allowing their own control to be taken away. Option B is clearly "speaking" for another entity's intent for themselves (blaming). Case in point, making up a bunch of BULLSHIT that HN mods are cheerleaders for the government is absolutely crapola rationalization. They may themselves be cheerleaders for capitalism, but there's no truth they represent or support a more controlling government. Even arguing this point is a complete waste of time, which I hazard is the point anyway with dissonance.

Stop introducing dissonance into rational conversations. If you were being trustworthy, you'd put your name to your words.

Not only are you going beyond "rational conversation", you seem to be violating the HN guidelines by saying the above comment is "a bunch of BULLSHIT".

>"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3.""

> You accept the tyranny before you and laugh at those who resist

There are many who claim tyranny and resist just because they aren't the ones in power. I'm not so sure that just because someone shouts tyranny that we all have to fall in line behind them.

I think you're over-reacting, this change just allows the FBI to pursue investigations on the internet. Having these jurisdictions made sense in the time of horse and buggy when people weren't as mobile, but a crime committed on an IP address, forcing the FBI to get a warrant from a SPECIFIC judge where the IP address matches the jurisdiction seems unnecessary and doesn't provide much actual value.

The term hacking is overloaded anyway. If a criminal is hiding out in a concrete building with a big steel door, is the FBI committing burglary with burglary tools if they use a pick gun to pick the door lock? I don't think so. Just because a method (hacking, lockpicking, etc) is used, doesn't make it automatically some evil conspiracy to hack into everyone's machines all the time and blackmail you based on your usage habits and personal preferences for things like political affiliation, sexuality, religion, etc.

Completely wrong. Among other things it codifies the use of general warrants by the FBI, one of the prime reasons we went to war in 1776.

Where, specifically? For your reference, here is Rule 41 with the differences marked: https://www.justsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/prop...

In general I think the problems with this change have been slightly overstated. However, GP is correct.

The Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution provides in relevant part: > [N]o Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

A general warrant is one which does not "particularly describ[e] the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized".

The amended rule provides in relevant part > A magistrate judge [...] has authority to issue a warrant to use remote access to search electronic storage media [of which the location] has been concealed through technological means.

Now, one doesn't have to be a constitutional scholar to see that "the place to be searched" hasn't been interpreted recently (if ever) to mean "latitude and longitude". However, there's a valid concern that the inability to even place the "where" to a particular jurisdiction is a massive weakening of the requirement to "particularly describ[e]". It may indeed be so weak that the result can be fairly called a "general warrant". How could the warrant be written otherwise? What information could it contain? I speculate the "description" will amount, in practice, to "unknown hard drive in unknown location, possibly containing X contents". That is a general warrant, because no hard drive fails to meet those criteria.

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