As JWZ put it:
"A venture capital company's fan club, finance-obsessed manchildren making the world worse"
Slightly NSFW source: https://cdn.jwz.org/images/2024/hn.png
Care to revise your view?
But thanks for the kind reply—I confess I was expecting something else!
Edit: incidentally, (and not directing this at you personally!), if even one of the commenters spending their time complaining about flags on HN had let us know about this submission at hn@ycombinator.com, this would probably have happened earlier. I say "probably" because I haven't processed all the emails from the last 12 hours yet.
- Include the post item in your subject line. That would be "42922647" for this particular story.
- Include some idea of what the problem is. For example, for a flagged story I'd have "vouch" as the first word of my subject, followed by the article title.
- I typically include the full article link (in body) and title (in subject) as insurance against my own fat-finger-fumbling.
- A brief description of the problem. E.g., "I'd like to vouch for this article".
My own typical emails are for titles (frequent), link indirection, preferred sources, and occasional mentions of flagrant violations of HN comment guidelines (flagging tends to pick those up most of the time).
For the latter, you can use the "replies" endpoint to see if a mod has previously responded to a given userID, e.g.:
For dang replying to me: <https://news.ycombinator.com/replies?id=dredmorbius&by=dang>
(Yes, there's an admonishment in there if you dig back far enough, and I remember it.)
I haven't been flagging these topics, but I have defended those who do, on the grounds of "not politics" and "leads to flamewar discussions". On the politics front, you have deliberately allowed more politics recently (or at least that's my perception) when you thought it was of general interest, or of tech interest. But the discussions are, perhaps less flame-full than expected, still somewhat incindiary (not least the discussions around flagging, with accusations up to being full-on fascists aimed at those who just don't want HN to be overrun by this).
So: What made it clear to you that this was something that should not be flagged?
> What we're looking for includes: is the article not too repetitive of recent discussions? does it contain significant new information? is there a reasonable chance that it could support a substantive, thoughtful discussion, or is it too flamebaity/provocative?
This article is a personal attack on individual engineers that are evidently very talented.
There's now a bunch of people using HN for personal insults in the comments.
I think the flags were warranted and turning them off was unnecessary.
Contentious topics, regardless of how merited a discussion might be, tend to draw flags inordinately. But again, you generally can't blame mods for this.
(HN does systemically penalise, or outright ban, numerous sites. I strongly doubt Wired is in either category, though if you want to know for certain, you can email mods. For a number of fairly evident reasons the full list isn't publicly disclosed, though pg provided some lists and extracts early in HN's histoyry, notably <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=499044> and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4984095>. There were 38,719 banned sites as of the end of 2012, a number which has doubtless increased.)
