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Comment by viridian | Hacker News Reader

Some interesting meta observations for the few people who read my comment in this already enormous thread. I noticed that opinions on the issue seemed split rather 50/50 until I started seeing the same couple of names over and over on the "no evidence of cheating" side. And in fact, searching the HTML document for this page for a particularly prolific name yields that they make up about 10% of all posts in the thread.

I'm not sure why someone would respond to dozens of all comment threads, but the different tones of voice, presented familiarity with the topic, between posts are disconcerting. I've never accused anyone of being a bot or shill (nor am I now) because I've seen starry-eyed true believers of just about every cause, idea, and entity, but this behavior is exceptionally unusual.

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I think this is another example of the very common pattern of 90% of the contributions in online discourse come from 10% of the population with 90% of post coming from a 1% minority of the overall population. It's not unusual at all.

60+ comments in a single HN thread is common?

In a pool of 700+ comments, yeah. Especially if they feel like no one else commenting is representing their point of view.

I thought there was a limit to how frequently you can post a comment and if you post more than x in y minutes you can't post for a while....

From my experience I'd say it's something like 5 comments in 5-10 minutes will trip you up.

I have experienced no such limitation and never see it myself. Googling shows me the current policy is rate limiting accounts when they "post too many low-quality comments and/or get involved in flamewars."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32771195

Pretty sure getting rate-limited is a rite-of-passage on HN.

I've definitely hit rate limits when bulk replying.

I wonder what statistics Dang has on this (though you generate your own with a crawler).

I've been thinking about this after having read https://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/ again recently. That research was shared in 2006/9. They didn't quantify a upvote/reward driven website but I suspect hacker news is closer to the blog numbers than the general, so the percentage would be skewed. The closest statistics would be Reddit's, the self selecting "top 1%" subreddit has imposed a minimum of roughly 107000 combined karma/points which is roughly 114k users out of an estimated 52 million daily, 430 million monthly, and 1.5 billion registered total users.

You wouldn't need to crawl for your own dataset, it's available on Google's bigquery https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/y-combi... and slightly older 2006 to 2017 dataset is available on kaggle for direct download https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/hacker-news/hacker-news .

https://www.karmalb.com/user/rank:114000

https://www.reddit.com/r/top

https://earthweb.com/how-many-people-use-reddit/

I am into chess, was studying it, have read few books on chess.

People who know near zero about chess seem to come out of woodwork to defend underdog who is attacked by the top level clique. Its understandable, but to me its akin to the flat earth arguments. All based on emotions, never have much to say about chess.

Anyone who knows a bit about chess (lets say advanced level), would point to the post game interview of game vs Firouzja as amazingly suspicious. It feels like a guy in group project who did noting and is trying to explain the project to their professor.

50/50 split is either illusion or its due to inflation of randoms giving their opinions.

No sound human would bee asking random ppl to determine if a patient has a cancer as a diagnostic tool. Cheating in chess is at top level extremely subtle, how is a random 1000 player any authority on the topic?

Agreed. Not only the firouzja interview but also the post game interview after the magnus match. It struck me as someone cheating on a test and being unable to show their work after the fact. Alejandro was pushing back against his analysis even before the cheating allegations came out. And his apology interview was full of inconsistencies where he couldn’t keep his story straight. This video does a body language analysis of the apology. While I don’t think you can put too much stock into the defensive postures, his behavior and his story is suspect at best https://youtu.be/OK9ZkoSQNFs

The issue I have with this is Hans is obviously either some god-level cheater (who can also cheat at rapid formats?? in casual settings - like in parks, on the beach, etc??) or he's actually 2500-2600 (or, let's even say 2400).

If he's 2400, he can still analyze. This leads me to believe that the dude is just trolling. IDK. I haven't watched all his interviews, but he seems like a troll.

I don’t think he necessarily has to be god level. This has been talked about ad nauseum but it’s not that hard to cheat just a little to gain significant advantage. Security has been lax at these events and there are numerous examples of cheating at the top level of many sports and throughout chess history. It’s definitely not that outrageous to see the possibility. Rapid and classical are different games that require different skill sets. He is definitely strong regardless which I think most people agree on. So you may have a point that he should still be able to have better analysis than what he showed. Especially if it’s a classical game where you have been thinking and calculating deeply for 2 hours. Perhaps the analysis was whack exactly because he wasn’t thinking and calculating deeply in these critical positions as magnus suggests in his statement.

None of us know for sure and it’s all speculation at this point. He could be trolling. He could be cheating. At some level he lied in his apology interview. He has not acknowledged the statement chess.com made in which they accused him of lying and cheating more often and more recently than he admitted. There’s just a lot of suspicion and sometimes where there’s smoke there is fire. My guess is he is a strong grandmaster that desperately wanted to be a super gm and took some shortcuts to get there.

My point is the argument "he can't even do analysis" does not match up with the argument "it’s not that hard to cheat just a little to gain significant advantage"

To do the second, you need to still be extremely good at chess. Way beyond the level required to do any type of analysis.

"Perhaps the analysis was whack exactly because he wasn’t thinking and calculating deeply in these critical positions as magnus suggests in his statement."

You'd still need to calculate, if you're "just cheating a little"

trolling?

Throwing suspicion over your career is great way of destroying it, and what for? trolling?

What you suggest is akin to being a cop and trolling other cops by doing suspicious things to pretend to be dirty cop... for jokes?

Hans is obviously a troll, is what I'm saying. He likes being edgy during interviews.

I don't really like the guy TBH. I don't watch his interviews because I don't think he's funny or entertaining or informative.

I'm just saying, he says a lot of weird shit - but other GMs do, too.

I'm not saying he's trolling by cheating ???

trolling is 'playing stupid' (saying or doing something) in order for others to get annoyed, offended or waste their time.

in his case it would be to pretend to cheat so everybody looses their shit.

being edgy , wierd or socially anxious is not trolling when its not on purpose.

I clarified what I meant, not sure what you're trying to accomplish with your comment.

Well he obviously can’t cheat at the beach because Magnus absolutely destroyed him there: https://youtu.be/T1OBEY99inw

Lol both those games only show the opening. There's no way for me to analyze these games. Lots of speculation as the dude in the video says.

You claim the other side is just using emotions, then you use arguments like this:

"It feels like"

Do you see no irony here?

lol

The issue is fairly split. I saw a poll recently: yes and no were split, but "I don't know" took up a large majority.

I don't think it's too surprising that some people have strong opinions about this matter either.

I'm happy to take your word for the fact that it's reasonably split, I don't have a dog in this particular race.

The strange thing to me then, is that with regards to this Hacker News thread, it is fairly split in sentiment if you look at the total number of comments in either direction, but if you look at unique commenters it overwhelmingly swings one direction.

My question from that premise is, why is that the case? Specifically, I've never seen a hacker news thread with 250+ comments where a single person or a handful make up such a large percentage of the comments. The human effort required for such a thing is significant, and obviously that can't scale forever. I'd be surprised that with tiktok and youtube videos with 30000+ comments, if there's ever been a case of a single person responding 3000+ times.

You've never seen one or you've never paid enough attention to notice?

This is against terms of use here, many of us have been nailed stating similar for other posts. The guideline is "assume the best" (or something like that).

Thanks. Edited such that my post isn't so targeted, at least. If it's still insufficient and gets taken down, it happens. I think my post is far less interesting than the observed behavior I mention.

I tend to agree that there are interesting things like this, or at least there are interesing things to consider. Perhaps there is need for a "shadow HN", it's a forum explicitly for the purposes of discussing the meta of posts, mapped 1:1. Browser plugin injects a link to flip/toggle the thread to shadow mode. Nice visual overlays of all the assertions and how they were inferred, some bot calculations, etc.

Astroturfing and manufacturing consent / mass manipulation is stupidly common here, and on reddit.

Probably just someone with a strong opinion tbh

Maybe you're talking about me. I don't even like Hans. I just think people are morons for spewing bile that harms someone's real life.

I know a little bit about the situation (though not an expert - I haven't researched it a ton, just tried to think critically about the situation) due to the fact that yeah, drama is entertaining. But I also think what the WC is doing is disgusting - he is using his position of power to harm someone, and doesn't have much evidence, really, none at all, other than him saying "trust me."

Also, the parallels between this and political discord are really interesting to me, and I wish I were smart enough to boil that down on a sociological level and express myself but unfortunately I am not.

I didn't know anything about Hans until Magnus dropped out of the tournament and this all started. I follow chess, and I didn't even know (consciously, I am sure I heard it and didn't take close note) at the time that he beat Magnus, until he dropped out.

I probably should not care too much, and do something more useful with my time, but it is super annoying to me that people are spreading misinformation to such a degree and no one seems to really care that that this can really impact someone's life.

On top of that, I strongly do not believe that someone should be branded for life due to their past actions.

Do you even need to search the HTML? Just a generic find of the browser's search will reveal the same info. Not sure why you'd need to go to that trouble.

at the time I read this and replied, your comment was top of the stack. without reading the full comments, i'm already reading your comment as someone that's got their knickers in a twist rather than reading a substantive comment. so hopefully that's what you wanted?

New comments start out at the top and sink within a few minutes, only a select few will have that problem.

Ctrl+f gives false positives for name mentions, and searching the html is just as easy. Benefits of having spent so much time dealing with css style/class related bugs, I guess.

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