Hacker News Reader

Comment by perihelions | Hacker News Reader

- "None of this is in any way normal," Matthew Green, a professor specializing in cryptography at Johns Hopkins University, wrote on Mastodon. He continued: "Has anyone been in contact? I hear he’s been missing for two weeks and his students can’t reach him. How does this not get noticed for two weeks???"

Prof. Green also posted about the vanishing of Prof. Wang here on HN the other day,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43518196

(That's where I first heard of it). But HN is an increasingly difficult place to discover such stories, what with the systematic flagging brigades.

View on HN

> But HN is an increasingly difficult place to discover such stories, what with the systematic flagging brigades.

What stories are getting flagged?

A lot of stories with a political angle get flagged.

I also don’t want the site to become all politics, but it feels weird to me that stories like this with overt overlap with tech and SV still often get flagged.

I don't think this story is overtly political.

Well, neither do I. My (obviously biased) take is that there seems to be a large contingent of supporters of the Trump administration that feel any discussion of its incompetence is just political bellyaching.

You can see it on this story. It was in the top 3 on HN as of a few minutes ago and now is already down to #20 on the front page. Although this could also be potentially blamed on the flamewar detector, but I'm not sure if the specific cause matters in this instance since the primary complaint is the lack of visibility these stories get.

It also seems like perihelions's comment likely received some flags as it went from being the top comment to being buried down at the bottom near a bunch of fully flagged comments.

> You can see it on this story

This story is on the front page and stories like it have been on the front page almost every day since last October.

[flagged]

> Did you stop reading at the end of that sentence you quoted?

I read and ignored it because when I see people making claims like this it sounds conspiratorial. You have been here a while, though, so I’ll assume you know how the rank algorithm works, in which case I would say that the flame war detector you’re describing is the more likely explanation. There were six top-level comments flagged dead when I opened the thread.

These kinds of threads hit the front page every day, though, so I don’t get why people act upset that they get flagged when 90% of them don’t belong here.

[flagged]

2 stories about ICE were in the top 5 yesterday and within 60 minutes one of them was at #80, the other I could no longer find.

It might not be a conspiracy but these stories do get removed one way or another.

They get flagged because they have nothing to do with the forum’s subject.

> 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.

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

Check out https://news.ycombinator.com/active

It's like an alternate HN front page that sorts based on activity, and unlike the default front page, it does not suppress submissions that have been flagged. At this moment I see these flagged-but-very-active submissions:

[flagged] Trump says he is not joking about third presidential term https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43525860

[flagged] It's the hottest car company. You can't buy one in America https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43523797

[flagged] [dead] Trump suggests Tesla vandals should face 20 years jail, be sent to El Salvador https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43520632

[flagged] ICE Revoking Students' Immigration Statuses Without Their or the Uni's Knowledge https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43528356

Interesting, I had never seen this view before. All but one of those submissions, however, appear to be off-topic; they are being flagged because they are not pertinent to the forum’s subject.

I’m missing the chronology here

So he was missing for two weeks already and then the FBI raid occurred Friday? Who was the woman at the house if not his wife

The woman was at their second home, which I am guessing she was renting as a tenant.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com