Hacker News Reader

Comment by jdmark | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

None of my posts should be flaggable at this point. Probably Russian trolls?

From the guidelines:

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, 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.

Most people aren't here to read about the Russia/Ukraine conflict. You submit articles very frequently on the topic, so it's not surprising that some of them get flagged.

The topics that I submit are mostly related to new technological developments in the defense industry. I try to give leads in new military technology so if engineers and software developers want to contribute or start a career path in the defense industry they have a leg up.

This particular post about Russian war crimes has over 60 comments which I think is significant and the post should not be flagged.

I am a high profile Ukraine War activist and what I post I think matters. Quite a few people in the defense industry and government read the posts that I submit to Hacker News YCombinator. I have a very large following in government and the international defense industries. I am working on a better work flow for news aggregation to bring more relevant up-to-date news to this community here and on X.com.

When it comes to war crimes and stories that relate to human atrocities I think an acception should be made here.

It's really up to the community and mods what counts as tech news, and clearly they disagree with you.

I just wanted to make sure it wasn't Russian trolls that flagged this post as it is the first or one of the first and the article is about Russian "death camps". I try to focus entirely on engineering and tech related to the war in Ukraine in hopes of recruiting and encouraging engineers and software developers to help improve the situation in Ukraine by improving their technological capability while also offering opportunities to participate and develop their careers at the same time.

I'm working on my work/information flow so I'm able to spread better tech related news here at HackerNews YCombinator.

I enjoy reading and contributing the highly technical articles as that is what we want here. We don't want low level shit here. Slipping in one of these off-topic related articles is okay every now and then but I thought it would be at least interesting for us to read something about the condition of prisoners and their deaths due to ill-treatment. The world needs to know.

My news aggregation website is coming soon. It is just a matter of risk, reward, and maintenance with the site itself. If I had the funding and did not have to work a normal day job I would do it over night.

Cherry pick news articles that fit a certain theme and post them? Anyone can do that. Aggregate maps and data, sure.

I think what matters most in this type of post is the type of discussion that results, even if it is off topic.

Others disagree.

> It's really up to the community and mods what counts as tech news, and clearly they disagree with you.

I don't think that's true. There's indeed plenty of engagement in this discussion, quiver above the average engagement in HN, but somehow it sounds like there's some kind of counter pressure to bury this particular discussion.

A high engagement to low voting score is actually a negative indicator, which is an opinion held by the moderation team because if that ratio is bad enough it gets auto-deranked and possibly flagged.

> From the guidelines:

> > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics,

Contemporary history should not be conflated with politics. There can be some overlap, but what this article describes are significant events that go far beyond everyday politics.

> Most people aren't here to read about the Russia/Ukraine conflict.

That can be said about pretty much any topic on this site. However, it is clear that there is still considerable interest in the topic even if it is below 50% of the user base

> Most people aren't here to read about the Russia/Ukraine conflict.

I don't know what "most people" is supposed to mean. To me, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, as the US presidential elections, are clear examples of an interesting new phenomenon.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine is particularly relevant to techies by the way Ukraine has been thrashing a full-blown invasion by Russia with nove high-tech weapons such as it's vast array of cheap drones.

Also, I'd say that a genocide in 21st century Europe is quite novel.

I emailed the admins to investigate why this post was flagged and by who.

Users flagged it. We can only guess why users flag things, but here's what I can tell you: (1) it was an unusually large number of flags; (2) the average account age of the flaggers is more than 8 years, and most are active contributors on a wide range of topics; and (3) I looked through all their flagging histories and found only one whose flags were consistently political and one-sided. That is not the case with any of the others, and nearly all seem to be using flagging as intended.

In the past it has been helpful to mention a list of "users who flagged X also flagged the following", so in that spirit, I've included a list below. The point here is not that all those other flags were good (a few were in fact bad), it's that the accounts are flagging a wide variety of stories and not in a predictable way.

---

In what format is Euro2024 broadcast in your country? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40837829

Dev rejects CVE severity, makes his GitHub repo read-only - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40837791

Goldman Sachs says the return on investment for AI might be disappointing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40837081

Farewell MongoDB: why you only need PostgreSQL - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40836988

Analisis Tingkat Kemenangan Pada Berbagai Jenis Permainan Slot Di Mahongbet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40835300

DeSantis' Ban on Cultivated Meat: Food Freedom Battered in the State of Florida - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40834342

Welcome to the Scene [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40833179

That job you applied for might not exist - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40828708

Anyone likes mechanical keyboard sounds? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40828566

Oklahoma orders schools to teach Bible 'immediately' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40816352

Italian Revenue Agency demands 1B from Google for tax evasion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40812608

The rarest book in American literature: Poe's Tamerlane - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40795556

Why is Microsofts chat widget over 6MB of JavaScript code? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40785986

Why do we still teach people to calculate? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40771627

How to do the jhanas - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40771514

OpenAI's GPT-5 Pushed Back to Late 2025, but Promises PhD-Level Abilities - https://news.ycombinator.com/item? id=40759361

I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40734228

The number of CS grads who don't even know basic Git commands is astounding - https://news.ycombinator.com/item? id=40689779

Nitrogen dioxide exposure due to gas and propane combustion by U.S. stoves - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40407472

Git commit messages are useless - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39135304

Asian Boss planted deep blue YouTuber and pretended he was a 'man on the street' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29888933

I once did a mistake of reading phoronix comments to an article mentioning Ukraine. All of them were full of easily verifiable lies. All the accounts were 8+ years old. I think it's just Russian expats who enjoy their comfortable life abroad, don't want to live in Russia, but still fully support Putin.

I don't know about other sites but there's no evidence of that being the case here, and plenty of evidence to the contrary. One can never know for sure, of course.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com