State Department: The U.S. does not recognize the concept of ‘diplomatic asylum’ | Hacker News Reader

State Department: The U.S. does not recognize the concept of ‘diplomatic asylum’

thecable.foreignpolicy.com

28 pointspitiburi9 comments

Wow... I really don't get the algorithm.... I posted the story, it was on the "new" page... it started to get votes, it went into the first page, it was 20th, then 16th, then 14th, and then... suddenly at minute 24, it went right into position... 658th??? Really??? What is going on???

Btw, it had 7 votes when it was ostracized. At the top 100 there are many stories with fewer votes and way older. Can someone explain it to me? I really don't get it.

If someone flagged it that would explain that behavior. Flagging counts as a large number of downvotes in ranking algorithm.

Oh, thanks for the explanation, I see. Still, I would love the one that flagged it to explain what was in the story to flag... I really can't see what reason would it be to flag it. And I am not whining, I would really like to understand so next time I don't make the same mistakes. Still, the upvoting count was unchanged, if it was downvoted it did not show in the count. Well, thanks, living and learning.

I didn't flag it. I wouldn't have flagged this.

However, if I were to guess why someone would, it is leaning towards falling foul of the "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic" and its possible someone was fed up of seeing Assange on the front page.

I wouldn't worry too much about it though.

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon."

...but I really think that if meat allergies, carbon emissions and fukushima are in the main page, then a pivotal, defining moment in USA foreign policy history should be allowed to be there too: the USA have just declared that they, as a general policy, do not recognize the political asylum figure. Not just in this case, but in general. That is pretty big in international affaires, and also an unexpected turn of events in the most important public information leak ever. Pretty important I thought, but the story seems to have been flagged yet again. Oh well, at least I know why you are flagging it, so Thanks for the heads up. Wow, position 688. You guys really love to smash to invisibility what you don't want others to read, uh?

Someone probably flagged the story. That can make it jump down really fast.

How do you determine what position a story is in?

I will say the mysteriousness of the front page algorithm, the seeming difficulty in getting an interesting story up there, adds to the concerns discussed yesterday about HN being a not so friendly place anymore.

Especially if mystery flags without explanation can sink a story to negative infinity.

In addition, of all the HN stories that showed up in Google Reader this morning, this was the one that seemed most interesting and that I had not seen anywhere else.

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