Note that even if it is a suicide, it is still a safety problem of the environment surrounding engineers. Since it is Boeing that pressured him until he committed suicide.
- Little of HN's moderation is done directly by moderators. Rather it's user actions (flags on stories, downvotes and flags on comments), and some automated mechanisms, most especially the "flamewar detector".
- HN detects flames where a story has > 40 comments and the ratio of comments to votes is greater than one. As I write this comment, the story has a ratio of 2.24:1, which is quite high. The average front-page story floats far closer to 0.55 to 0.60 (2021 & 2022, respectively, see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36926236>, based on my own analysis of all HN front-page archives).
(At some point I'd looked at all the "spiciest" HN stories in the front-page archive, and though I don't have that handy, a 2.24 ratio is remarkably high by comparison.)
The flamewar detector isn't perfect, but it's often appropriate, and can take what seems to be an otherwise interesting story off HN's front page quite quickly. I've seen this happen to a number of my own submissions, and until I understood the mechansism and cause (and inquired to the mods via email) it could be quite discouraging. Note that mods do occasionally override the metric (as they have in this case, see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39676385>).
Ironically, your best defence against the flamewar detector is to upvote the story and not comment on it.
- The story is of course possibly significant, but we've got very little information to go on presently. HN, as with other online discussion sites, has a tendency to go off half-cocked in such cases, often with regrettable results in terms of discussion accuracy or relevance. My suggestion is to absorb the report, keep it in mind, suspend judgement as to what you think may have happened, and look for further investigations or reports.
Yes, I agree with you. I was doing double speak. Many things of public interest are nudged "off the front page". Promoting Political Bread & Circuses instead. I think the networks of the Managerial Class are tight. Due to shared interests, values, & upbringing. So I'm not surprised to see the circling of wagons. I'm more surprised that this post was not flagged yet.
I don't think it's a matter of curiosity. If most of the comments in this thread were things like the history of corporate violence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence_in_the_Uni...) then I think there would be less downvotes. Few people are aware of corporate oppression of the past which robs people of context for the present.
Unfortunately rather than provoking curiosity by introducing people to information they didn't know they didn't know, most of the comments here are some form of "in the back of the head twice..." which just isn't interesting or thought provoking.
Edit: I'm tired and let my snark guard down—sorry. No, I don't want to "quietly get rid" of this kind of topic, except insofar as lurid sensationalism isn't what HN is for. This story is unusual enough that it gets a bit of a curiosity pass.
"Riskiness" in any dark sinister sense doesn't play into any of this on the HN side. It's all boringly straightforward, with just enough randomness to be confusing.