General Motors declares bankruptcy | Hacker News Reader

General Motors declares bankruptcy

guardian.co.uk

37 pointsksvs24 comments

From the guidelines:

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

I think they may have covered this on TV. Just a little bit, you know.

I've got nothing against the nytimes article that takes a very specific angle on this story and tells us about the kind of people they have in charge of all this, but straight-up "GM is bankrupt" stories don't really fit the HN mould imho.

There's been a lot of "off-topic" stuff lately. I feel your pain.

On the other hand, there's this other guideline:

"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site."

Yeah, I know. I'm still trying to figure out a clever way to basically state that I've flagged the story and encourage others to do so as well.

I think until pg makes the flagging process more visible so that stories like this get killed, I'll have to go and make silly posts like this (karma be damned).

Agreed.

"5,000 people flagged this" would be a visible public notice that most people don't want it there.

While I agree that this would encourage people to go along rather than apply their own standards, I'm not so sure that's a good thing.

Surely that's what happens with upvotes?

That's true. On the other hand, having a flag score would mean that it effectively became a downvote, and presumably those aren't in HN for a reason. I'm not sure of the actual effect of all this.

It'd only become a downvote if it affected ranking. I was just suggesting it be shown.

Why not just have faith that others will likewise flag it and it will get killed? Do you write a comment every time you upvote something to encourage others to follow your lead?

I can see commenting as to why you voted a certain way if you have something insightful to point out like: "This is actually false, because blah blah", but otherwise, you just have to have faith that the rest of us are out here flagging things too. ;)

Yeah, I know. I'm still trying to figure out a clever way to basically state that I've flagged the story

Yeah, you know what the rules are and you're still trying to figure out a clever way to break them?

You're behaving like a house guest who keeps trying to rearrange the furniture in the living room. Despite repeated polite requests to stop. Who responds with arguments about how the design is all wrong.

Your analogy is unfair. This isn't somebody's house, it's an online community. We all built the furniture together, placed it together, and are using it together.

Twitter and Facebook are covered all the time on TV. Should stories about them be banned too? I just think that the TV litmus test is too simplistic.

Indeed, and Tesla gets mentioned here all the time.

It's also a big topic likely to get some interesting commentary from HN readers. It, combined with GM's replacement in the DOW by Cisco, represents a shift in the US economy from manufacturing towards technology.

This is a momentous event. This sort of story is the reason that sentence contains the word "probably."

Whereas the guidelines are very specific about not submitting comments of the type you just did. And this page shows why. Now we have an entire thread of boring metacommentary.

To be honest, I find the metacommentary a bit more interesting than the article.

The metacommentary is what shapes HN as a community. In that sense, at least, it has some value.

The article on the other hand: I've already read it a lot of times. First there were the articles that GM may declare bankruptcy, then there were the articles how GM is more likely to declare bankruptcy, then there were the articles how GM is one step closer to bankruptcy and now, finally, GM declares bankruptcy. All these articles were the same, apart from the headline, every one of those articles were published in a gazillion sources, none adding interesting commentary, and then all of it repeated because some European/local car maker depends on GM and needed to be sold. I've read one of those articles and I've read them all.

I think in that sense the "if it was on TV, it shouldn't be here"-thing is quite valid: You'll encounter it everywhere and there's no value in discussing it here, because it has been discussed to death already.

Now, I don't really like the metacommentary either, even though I'm participating in it, but I do think the article gets undue credit. It's not really that valuable.

Yes, this is momentous, but there's nothing new to be said about it, likely (prove me wrong, someone!). However, metacomments are interesting all the time, in the same way and for the same reason that people like talking about themselves.

That's not exactly an endorsement, of course...

I think in that sense the "if it was on TV, it shouldn't be here"-thing is quite valid

But "thing", you mean the sentence whose author just explicitly said it doesn't apply to this story? I guess not... I guess you mean your insistent misunderstanding of said sentence. sigh

On Channel 4 News they are referring to GM now as Government Motors.

Channel 4 is what broadcasting company exactly in your area? Here it's NBC4; I very much doubt NBC is in the business of name calling wrt government "expansion" as Fox would, not to mention that NBC is owned by GE who is in strong business with .gov:

http://www.cjr.org/resources/?c=ge

In the UK, there's a broadcasting company called "Channel 4". That's what he was referring to.

http://www.channel4.com/

There are also Channel 4s in essentially every US city. It's unusual for the British to be even more provincial than the Americans, but this is an example of it.

No, this "Channel 4" is a huge broadcasting company, around the size of the BBC. They have multiple actual channels:

- Channel 4

- Film 4

- more4

- e4

- 4music

and video-on-demand.

Would be better discussed on newmogul.com. As such, flagged.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com