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Comment by throwaway5752 | Hacker News Reader

It's ridiculous this is the top trending submission when the president fired the FBI director that was investigating his ties to Russia. If political stories are fair game, this is important but a rounding error next to Comey.

@dang, the HN ranking system is so trivially hackable via downvotes and flags by a motivated minority.

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Neither story is a good fit for HN. HN is for the gratification of intellectual curiosity, not the other more intense forms of curiosity (or gratification). Like most political stories, these fall out of HN's scope.

> so trivially hackable

That's a misunderstanding of how HN's system works. Hot political stories typically get tons of upvotes. That happens first. Then they get flagged and/or moderators penalize them. That's routine, and it's what happened to both of these submissions—the only difference was the several hours' gap between them.

There seems to be a wide variance in the way political stories are handled; for example, political issues not involving Trump seem more accepted. I suppose consistency in this matter isn't that important, except that it's a bit frustrating to spend time on comments or submissions that are (effectively) solicited, and then have them (effectively) discarded. It would be helpful if the standards were explained in a little more detail, perhaps in the Guidelines (so people can find them), so we know what to expect. As I said in another comment, I feel like I'm trying to reverse engineer your policies and intentions.

While personally I wish there were more political issues discussed intelligently on HN - we shouldn't imagine that we live in an enclave safe from the very serious political situation - I will say that the recent discussions have been the most uninformative, valueless, wastes of my time that I've seen on HN in a long while. It's not hopeless; around the time of Trump's travel orders, for example, they seemed much better (and were allowed on the front page).

A lot of this is probably random. The system has a wide range of fluctuation, and trying to pin that down, clean it up, or make it consistent would likely just generate more noise.

It's going to be a really hard summer trying to thread that needle. Having seen politics ruin plenty of good forums, though, I sympathize. Appreciate the consistency.

You can't downvote submissions.

Some of the things that affect submission ranking is number of points, (increases) age, (decreases) and number of comments. Somewhat surprisingly, having more comments will penalize the ranking of a story, to push flamewars off the front page. This is to prevent HN from being Reddit, where r/all is a constant rolling flamewar. (The FBI submission has 5 times as many comments as this story, and has already fallen off the front page)

1) It happened 3 hours ago, 2-3 hours after the story in this submission was filed; 2) You can flag submissions, though, and you can downvote comments - and both lower the story's rank; 3) You can also spam a story with critical/spammy comments to provoke downvotes, also pushing down its rank.

Easy peasy.

1) Okay, so the comments penalty is especially strong. Sorry.

2) I don't think that downvoting a comment on a submission will affect that submission's ranking. If you leave a bunch of spurious flags the moderators will disable the flag feature on your account, though. (Happened to me)

3) Assuming a pool of colluding users, this would actually be a plausible attack-- except that HN's userbase is tiny, and the moderators are active. Voting rings show up easily, but I don't know if they're looking for "comment rings". An easy technical solution would be to ban users with "throwaway" in their name from commenting on submissions.

I managed to push a post off of the first page the other day, because my finger is too big for my phone - I clicked the Flag button instead of the actual link. I immediately clicked Unflag, but it took a while for the post to recover.

Downvotes of comments don't lower stories.

I really strongly had the impression that it was a combination of flags, some sort of metric of polarity (lots of upvotes/downvotes among the comments, and then moderator actions. I don't recall why I have that recollection, but apologies for any mistaken impression. It's probably better that it's not entirely transparent, either.

(1) It's been known since forever that Trump and the FBI director didn't see eye to eye, and the former employs the latter. Still significant, just not surprising.

(2) This story is tech related and way more on topic for HN then pure politics (https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html). I'm sure Reddit is having kittens, if politics is your thing.

> It's been known for a long time that Trump and the FBI director didn't see eye to eye, and the former employs the latter. Still significant, just not surprising.

The president firing the FBI director is huge news. The story is currently at the top of every single message board and news outlet except this one.

Precisely why it doesn't need to be here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

(emphasis mine)

Fact is that submission this is the sort of thing that could be interesting to the HN community and will probably get lost in the mainstream with news of Comey going. Comey going is huge news - there are other places to discuss it.

Disagree with this rule. This forum should not be a place for just showcasing freakin personal tech project only. Yesterday I read someone asking the community share how they spend their work day. One HNer said he works as a professional firefighter. Now I am not sure if he has done any programming or not but that's unexpected for a technical forum like this. I think technolgists like us have the same obligations as everyone else to particpate in civil matters professionally. We don't want to yell out the f word here but marking politics as off-topic is obsurd given privacy is a hot topic we almost never escape from politics. If neutrality has been covered on the news, dont't allow it. But hey I don't run HN so someone is going to tell me read ToS.

HN should embrace submissions either directly or indirectly related to politics. I feel our tech leaders are so silent today to the White House so silent on Trumpcare. Where the heck are they?

I come here specifically because it's not one of the million billion other places where all other stories get steamrolled by alt.gov.trumpdrama. I can think of two dozen places in less than 10 seconds where political news, analysis, and all of the related stone-throwing get top billing, and I utilize many of them regularly... my 1337 dev skills don't somehow make those political resources less useful to me. If there are government related stories with a technical bent, they do just fine here. Just because tech people have a civic duty to be aware of what's going on in the government doesn't mean that all tech communities should be political.

It's called finding people with similar interest. Knowing other technologists are interested in solving social issues isn't something we easy can get on othet sites which are overpopulated. HN is in a good size and the folks are mostly friendly and can the capacity to discuss professionally and openly.

I am disappoited that many of the tech leaders don't speak out hard enough. If I were as powerful as they, I wouldn't stand back. The fact our Congress is a disgrace when it comes to passing the new health care bill, we shouldn't hold back. There is no reason to. Because while that bill may not hurt thousands of Google/facebook employees, it will have impacts on their users and many of their own employees' families.

"It's called finding people with similar interest." That's what we're doing here. It's Hacker News. Those similar interests are technology and innovation. If politics are involved in tech stories, then the stories are here (hence the story we're commenting on.)

When you say your website is 'for' something, the implication is that you're 'not for' something else. This website is for technical news.

The fact that these "leaders" are involved in technology is mostly incidental, which is why some random tech CEO's opinion on health care doesn't get a whole lot of traction here. Unless there is a technological bent to their take on something, it's not really a technical story– it's yet another rich person that has something to say about politics. Even the ones who became notable for technical reasons, when speaking on non-technical political topics, are no more notable to me than Hollywood personalities doing the same.

I'm not saying you're wrong for caring about what they think or thinking that they should speak up more– I'm saying that the story would be newsfeed fodder at every site from Breitbart to Dissent Magazine, not to mention a million specialized sub-reddits. But how many places can I go to see a neatly ranked list of quality techy stories, such as the latest git release, some neat electronic music composition teaching demo, and news about modules in the JDK? Very, very few. The fact that this is a narrow niche makes it a resource for many people. We 'need' this space to discuss this tech stuff which is important to us as technologists, but given equal footing, would get crushed by stories about world-leadership-level politics.

So I fail to see any reason behind your implication that this group of people interacts with political news so differently that we need our own space to discuss them; we're not even unified in having a particular interest in politics, let alone solidarity on specific political viewpoints.

If you're really sure that I'm wrong, then why not leave Hacker News to start your own political-tech website? The hacker news source is available on Sourceforge. Make a fork and make a poli-hacker news. If people are interested, they'll show up. Even just starting a "poli-tech" subreddit to see if anyone bites.

My theory? We're just not that special.

(As an aside, I also think you're greatly overestimating the likelihood that tech CEOs opinions would align with your own, and it's quite likely that's why they're keeping their mouths shut to begin with. I know if I worked for some startup with a CEO who was fine at running a business but REALLY loved Milo Yiannopolis, I'd be pretty happy that he kept his mouth shut so our company would stay afloat and I could keep paying my rent.)

Who cares if they didn't see eye to eye. The FBI director was investigating his ties to Russia which could have been criminal. Close to a dozen FSB agents or people with ties to the agency died in suspicious circumstances after Steele's Trump dossier surfaced. Saying "the former employs the latter" grossly understates this - they serve 10 year as a compromise to prevent the accumulation of excess power (Hoover) but to insulate them from exactly this type of thing.

How many months or years must he remain employed for a witch hunt that likely will never end?

The dossier had been unsubstantiated for months when it was first reported, and it's been months and it's still unsubstantiated. This despite the media being decisively against Trump and it being the juiciest imaginable story. It's time to move on.

The director of the FBI serves at the pleasure of the President, as evidenced by the fact the latter just fired the former. If you don't like that, then I suggest you work on passing a law preventing it.

Obviously an employee of the President isn't going to police the President very effectively. Historically, that's what special prosecutors have been used for.

Yup. From a different branch of government.

Just an FYI - this story is as much, if not more, an IT story, than it is a political one. HN rightly favors discussing this.

As I keep saying, "politics" is a subjective description. When people see something as personally relevant/interesting to them or affecting them or people like them, then it's fair game for HN. When people see something as personally not relevant to them or not affecting them or people like them, it's "politics".

Which tells you some things about HN: the only way you get widespread agreement on what's "politics" and what isn't is by having a monoculture.

It seems to be that the criteria for HN posts is not "personally relevant/interesting to smbdy or affecting smbdy".

The criteria is IT related or scientifically interesting.

Not true. Plently of submissions about books and arts.

Why?

This is a far more important story than Comey.

Why do you feel this story is more important?

The census happens rarely and impacts politically important concepts like congressional districts. By undercutting the ability to have an accurate census, people can gain political advantage. Right now the Republican Party is basically propped up by older white men and women, but that is a rapidly diminishing demographic in the US. Pretty soon it will be dwarfed by other groups of people. By skewing the census, and the rarity at which they happen, Republicans can gain another 10 years or so of influence beyond what they should have (going by the numbers).

Appointees serve at the pleasure of the appointing authority. Firing one is a story, but ultimately not earth shattering.

The Census is something that is critically important to all sorts of "backend" processes in government. For example, your county probably apportions sales tax based on census figures.

It's sort of like the criticality of the employment and inflation statistics from the Department of Labor. Many processes assume that these tasks are completed correctly and with integrity.

When senior people like his who are cogs in the wheels of government resign at the prime of their careers, that means that something is broken or is about to be broken.

And let's not forget that the Census is the Constitutionally-authorized function for collecting the population data needed to enumerate representation in the House of Representatives: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial-census/abo...

It should be noted that the Director of the FBI serves a 10 year term, specifically to avoid the "serving at the pleasure of the President" item.

Yeah, this seems pretty serious to me. It's not a drop in the ocean as the op makes it sound .

I'm not trying to minimize this seriously bad Census Bureau news, but I am trying to contextualize it.

Are you people _still_ driving the Russia narrative despite there being ZERO actual evidence? All of the news I've seen posted online are just opinion puff pieces and people having gut feelings. No tangibles.

So "you people" who drove the Obama birth certificate narrative for ten years (not only with no evidence for, but concrete evidence against) are criticising a different set of "you people" for driving a narrative?

And a narrative with a lot of clear evidence of Russians in the same place at the same time as Trump team members, and probably a lot of evidence that the FBI, CIA and NSA have but can't release... hardly ZERO (in caps!) evidence. I'm from New Zealand so I don't have a dog in this fight, but it stinks to high heaven.

But both sets of "you people" should read this: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe

Yes, because there are red flags and smoke. Not to mention known economic ties. We aren't driving a narrative, we are concerned for the state of the US.

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