The White House's Alpha Geeks | Hacker News Reader

The White House's Alpha Geeks

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26 pointssteven13 comments

Amazing, the front page of HN has become completely politicized.

The snowden petition gets buried, the NY times misleading BS title stays and now this fluff piece of propaganda gets on front page.

HN is just another tool of propaganda for the white house.

Honestly, the tech efforts at the WH are about as non-partisan as anything I've seen. (I've talked to the USDS people; I think it's awesome; I'm far from a Democratic voter).

There are 10% of things people disagree on. There are a lot of things ~everyone agrees on. The political thing is to tie up everything waiting for the 10%. The tech solution is to do the 90% and defer the 10%.

This. I've worked on a project with USDS people on it, and their only objective was making shit work better. There was not the slightest hint of politics in anything they did.

I was considering a job with the USDS. Seriously reconsidering after the latest Edward Snowden pardon response.

I want to make government and society better; I don't want to be a tool used to enable further entrenchment of incumbent policies. I voted for Obama twice; disgusted doesn't really suffice for how I feel about how him, Kerry, et el are handling current tech policy.

Does the Bernie Sanders campaign have any volunteer technology team positions open?

I'd probably argue seat at the table is a prerequisite for any change.

I don't think he was talking political as in democrats and republicans.

The manufactured idea of partisanship in US politics is a very elaborate but worn out misdirection.

"There is only one party in US - business party" - Noam Chomsky (inventor of lex and yacc)

I am curious on the ranking. I just came back to see if I had any replies in the Snowden thread, and even though it's as old as this post and has 100 more points and 150 more comments it's on page 3. Anybody knowledgeable in HN ranking understand why that post would be on page 3 and this on page 1?

The HN team often penalizes particular topics they feel like are dominating the front page. As far as I can tell this is typically used to make sure the front page is mostly about buisness, startups and engineering with occasional other topics. But if one topic, like Snowden, starts to dominate the front page HN will not hesitate to penalize it.

We don't penalize topics. We penalize fluff, articles that contain no new information or have recently been discussed, etc. The goal is to have the most substantive articles on the front page. When substantive new information appears about Snowden I'm sure it will do fine here.

Three factors: user flags, the flamewar detector (a software penalty for discussions that usually aren't substantive), and a moderation downweight for not containing new information.

It's not hard to find three data points to prove anything you want about HN, so I don't see that as a serious criticism. But these points are wrong anyhow.

The Snowden petition thing is inconsequential theater. There's no new information in it, and so nothing substantive in the thread, just people repeating pre-existing opinions. That's not what HN is for. Threads like that routinely fall off the front page, mostly because of the flamewar detector, but we downweight them too. Such stories don't gratify intellectual curiosity because they're predictable.

The other two articles contain substantive reporting, so are fine here. That doesn't mean we endorse what they say or share their politics, whatever those may be.

We need to move beyond hardware & form factors.

This is not something that any of these people are willing to step up and tell the public.

Some have moved beyond hardware & form factors.

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