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Comment by qwerpy | Hacker News Reader

Strange that someone else’s question “Did it reduce catalytic converter theft?”, directly relevant to the article, got downvoted to death. Not sure if we’re meant to have discussions here or just dutifully complain about topics that are fashionable to complain about.

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I agree. I "revived" the comment by clicking on the timestamp ("33 minutes ago") and then clicking "vouch". I believe only users with a score of 200+ (points? karma?) can do so.

Been here 8 years, always wondered how comments died. I assumed it was algorithmic. TIL

“[dead]” usually means algorithmic (could be as simple as an account registered via Tor that hasn’t been vouched for enough times). “[flagged][dead]” usually means it was flag-killed by users, except I’ve been noticing some AI written comments that are flagged instead of just dead, but they’re minutes old so unlikely to be user flagged.

There's been an "AI comment detect" algo trialed and running for a month or so now.

If you see any probably human comments tagged as Mr Roboto either vouch (weak indication, needs a few others to boost) or email hn@<this site> for dang / tom to cast a meat based eyeball over it.

Does the account registration date also matter? I have 2110 points and I dont think I have the vouch button

you have to go into the actual [dead] comment itself (eg, click on the datestamp) for the vouch button to appear on that post, just like flagging comments several layers deep

I wondered that too. It doesn't say, but does state: "Data from the license plate readers, known in law enforcement as LPRs, was searched 62,000 times in 2025, leading to about 1,660 cleared catalytic converter theft cases, a report from the authority said."

Also, how many missing people are there? finding 10k seems quite a lot. “one of the most effective ways Flock has been able to help find, just last year, over 10,000 missing persons”.

The term "missing person" calls to mind someone who is in serious danger, but a majority are something minor, like someone quitting a job without notice or taking an unannounced trip. The vast majority are resolved by finding the person alive.

Flock helping close 10K cases doesn't surprise me at all, but it doesn't meant those people wouldn't have been found without it. It may mean less work for the police, but the police don't usually put a lot of effort into a missing person without evidence they're in danger.

Based on the cited document, "leading to" seems entirely made up.

Looks like correlation, not causation.

At best. What I got from it:

Our task force made x cat theft arrests

Our task force used flock y times

Flock isn't their only investigative tool, cats aren't their only focus.

When I worked for Flock, if Flock was searched in relation to a given case, if that case had a disposition, Flock considered themselves to have contributed to the solving of that case, regardless of what the search was or its relevance to the actual case. Searched for a car that was actually entirely unrelated but later police arrest someone in the act? Flock: "our cameras were involved in the resolution of the case".

Sadly that's very common on HN today.

I commented under a post about some skill claiming to unleash the superpower of Claude Code. I asked, is there any evidence aka benchmark that shows it's any better than vanilla Claude Code that is statistically significant?

Dead silence. But not downvotes -- easily got to -4.

SMH.

It seems like HN got more 'Reddit-like' in the last year or two, at least it resembles that platform in the way people use voting not as a way to encourage good argument style and punish bad (eg. ad hominem) but rather to vote with their feelings.

There are also a ton of one-line comments now, some that get upvoted to the top. That's 100 percent Reddit and 0 percent intellect.

I've been active here since 2009 and it started to get worse around 2016, and much worse in the last 2 years. Before 2016, any flippant, pointlessly cynical comment would be downvoted to oblivion. There were almost none that didn't get dead'd quickly. Now on political topics, those are the top half of comments.

There were always negative objection comments (like the famous dropbox one), but those are different. Many of these new cynical comments are not objecting, they're concurring with a poisonous cynicism.

I remember making this topic in late 2016 regarding it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13016237

It has been a few years now, probably mid to late 2010s if I had to guess. I'm sure someone with enough interest and tokens could do some kind of sentiment/data measurement in order to back up our anecdotes.

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