How the World Learned About the Pentagon’s Sky-High Nuclear Testing | Hacker News Reader

How the World Learned About the Pentagon’s Sky-High Nuclear Testing

theatlantic.com

48 pointsdanso11 comments

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18524847

Wow, HN's dupe detector is terrible. It's literally the exact same url, 3 hours earlier, and with more upvotes and comments.

I actually submitted mine first. But it was ignored, and the HN-dupe detector allows for other submissions of the same URL to get through if the first doesn’t hit front page.

The reason why my submission has a newer time stamp is because a mod flagged it to be re-upped, apparently not realizing that someone else’s submission had since made it to the front page:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380

As a long time HN member since 2012 or so, I will say...

HN has become a lot harder to get a story to the front page or even upvoted, based on merit. I used to be able to get stories to the front page repeatedly early on. Then it became that you had to ask a few friends to help upvote it to give it a kickstart. Now it never gets to even 10 votes no matter how good it is, while the exact same story may hit the front page.

Meanwhile there are tons of people that have voting rings or paying for upvoting services.

Something needs to change, the same way Reddit’s ranking algorithm was changed based on Randall Munroe’s public suggestion.

I want to ask the HN submitters here: in the last 1-2 years, what percentage of your contributions have been upvoted to the front page organically and why?

Or maybe ask the other way... of those that have, what was it? Because it’s certainly not the actual link or title, since ones submitted later with nearly exact same ones were upvoted much more heavily.

> Something needs to change, the same way Reddit’s ranking algorithm was changed based on Randall Munroe’s public suggestion.

That was a long time ago. Reddit ranking is even worse than HN's now and is manipulated by political and news organizations now with the help of reddit employees. Reddit is a highly biased propaganda site. It's not a platform anyone should be using. In many ways, reddit is worse than facebook.

I stopped using reddit once I could predict what I was going to see on the frontpage day after day. Sadly, I'm starting to be able to predict what's going to be on HN's frontpage now.

It’s a very serious area of research. Are there any good solutions in the literature to collusion-resistant voting and reputation?

Something like hotornot is voting resistant because it shows RANDOM photos so it would take a lot of effort and time for people to collude to upvote a particular photo.

But that is a site about one topic: hotness. How do you get people in smaller forums rate eg the strength of an argument without causing people opining on stuff they have no idea about (eg career politicians or chess fans rating claims about molecular biology).

I am seriously interested in building a site where each claim is debated exactly ONCE - you come and either upvote a pro/con argument (which itself rests on other claims) or submit a new one, and it would use Randall Munroe’s ranking system for display.

The idea is to make people discuss the truth or falsity of each claim once and for all. Politics, religion, news etc.

I can see how evidence ca accrue, eg if a video of an attack in Yemen is uploaded, it would join a growing list of other videos claiming to be accurate representations of this event. Each video should be kept. But which woukd be upvoted? What if some are doctored and heavily upvoted in a coordinated attempt by “sleeper” accounts that behaved well until that point? How would HN detect it?

Believable fake videos are not (yet) able to be produced. But fake photos already are. And other claims can be pure garbage. Fake news of all kinds has permeated the Web. I have often said that our systems have been designed to rely on the INEFFICIENCY of an attacker, and that needs to be changed in the next systems we design.

Voting is one of those. I understand how to make voting secure private and verifiable with Merkle Trees. I don’t know how to prevent collusion.

And any site which purports to bring everyone together to determine “truth” becomes a honeypot for disproportionate efforts to game it.

How does Wikipedia stay relatively good? At least as good as Britannica? I would love to more collaborative (open source) instead of competitive (capitalist) systems for software, news, drugs as it is for science etc.

How does science do it? They don’t, sometimes.

When it comes to centralized beliefs about truth, whether it’s who owns a token (preventing double-spending) or whether Gandhi “really” said that quote or whether Tienemen square really did happen, what is some literature about consensus about REAL WORLD (not electronically verifiable) claims that actually can’t be gamed so easily?

My submissions seem to be doing ok, you can check the list yourself. I don’t ask anybody to upvote. In fact I don’t know anybody with a HN account IRL.

@danso sorry for the dupe submission here. I don’t consider it my responsibility to check for duplicate submissions. If HN cares about those, they can do it in software far easier than submitters could do manually.

No need to apologize, happy to see the story discussed at all. And I’ve had plenty of dupes of my own upvoted over the original submission, it’s just a matter of chance

A few stories on my blog got to the front page. What they have in common is that they appeal to a broad audience.

I wrote a post about that, that itself never managed to get to the front page https://thehftguy.com/2017/09/26/hitting-hacker-news-front-p...

Operation Argus was primarily a DARPA operation, if I am not wrong. Why are they writing Pentagon all over?

DARPA is an agency of the Department of Defense (to which the metonym “The Pentagon” refers).

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