At first I figured the video would show him making some vague imitation people were overreacting to but no, full on mind blowing salute.
Written by a former nazi paperclip scientist
As an aside, this YT channel has the best series I've seen on WW2. They go through the war, week by week, telling all that happened that week. There are several mini-series like Crimes Against Humanity and Spies and Ties. The production quality is really good too
https://www.youtube.com/@WorldWarTwo
They are doing one on the Korean War right now
(mirror: https://files.catbox.moe/icky5m.mp4 )
Truly, Donald Trump could decide tomorrow to refuse audience with Zelenskyy and only meet with Putin. Russia's treasury would be hemorrhaging within a week and the government would be paralyzed in the middle of an active invasion. That would be dangerous for America and NATO allies, but what does that concern a non-member like Ukraine after all?
Russia has spent 30 years on life support. America and Ukraine simply disagree on how we pull the plug.
That's nearly always the case when you see [flagged] on a submission, btw. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
(It's a bit more complex with comments, but also the majority of [flagged] comments are flagged by users, not mods.)
“It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured,” Musk said.
Similar past use by Hitler.
“Only the Aryan can secure the future of civilization through his creative and organizing power.”
https://efiretemple.com/analyzing-adolf-hitlers-use-of-the-t...
More at >>42776410
Unlike, say, reddit, which has a bunch of subreddits for various topics, hacker news only has one feed. So it is naturally more restrictive about topic.
I can see how reasonable folks can see this post as sort of grey area, but at the end of the day, the users of hacker news flagged this post, the moderator -- who I've historically found to do a fantastic and neutral job of monitoring -- believes it does not meet HN guidelines, so I think this just isn't the platform to discuss this news. And that doesn't seem unreasonable, either. I'm sure there are other places to discuss it online.
[0] https://newrepublic.com/post/190464/did-elon-musk-nazi-salut...
You guys are talking about this (both the stimulus and the response) as if it's some unusual phenomenon. It's not—it's the most standard aspect of HN moderation. If we didn't moderate this way, HN would be a completely different site; the front page would be filled with the latest outrages. To see that, all you have to do is multiply the present situation by a sufficiently large number.
It always feels as if the latest high-energy stimulus as the important one, the indispensable one, the one where things will fall apart if we don't stop everything and argue about it right now. HN is about trying to disengage ourselves from that brain-chemistry ratwheel. I realize that energy is running higher than usual because of the events of yesterday, but again, that's the sort of dynamic this site is about not being determined by—irrespective of political position or feelings about celebrities.
In past threads I've described this as the difference between reflexive and reflective discussion. If anyone wants to understand the basic approach, maybe some of that would help: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....
One point that might be worth adding (or maybe not, but here it is): when you say "moderation is crucial" and "letting the discussion happen (with supervision)", I feel like you're overestimating the capacity of moderation. It is a scarce resource in several ways, some obvious some not. Part of this is about trying to invest it wisely.
For example, I put huge effort into moderating the thread about pg's "origins of wokeness" essay (>>42682305 ) and ended up, at the end of a long day, feeling like I had hardly made a dent. (The current case would certainly be worse.) So when you argue for letting a particularly flame-prone thread burn and posit that it can be turned into a thoughtful conversation by sufficiently effective moderation, my sense is "I don't think that's realistic".
Anyhow, that's a secondary consideration, but it is consistent with the primary considerations.
(Btw I had deleted the first paragraph of my comment because I felt it was cuttable, but since you quoted it, I've put it back.)
It's not possible to run a site like HN without moderation. However, if you delete moderated posts outright, users will rightly complain about censorship. I'm not referring to the politics of the last 10 years when I use that word; I'm talking about 2006 or so, when pg was first designing HN. The solution he came up with, which has held up well over the years, is not to delete moderated posts, but rather to tag them as "[dead]" in a way that anyone who wants to read them is welcome to.
So what you call "hiding the news from people without an account", I call "not deleting anything and making sure that anyone who wants to can read the complete set of moderated posts".
This is in the FAQ (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) and there's lots of past explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
(p.s. for those who like precision: HN does also have deletion, but only the author of a post is allowed to delete it, and only if it didn't have replies. We sometimes delete posts when users email and ask us to, but we never do this as part of moderation.)
I don't think locking comments out of threads would be in keeping with HN's mandate. We try to optimize for intellectual curiosity [1]. Preventing users from commenting, and reading each other's comments, would go against that.
I also feel like it would be a shallow technical trick to avoid facing the deeper issue of us all learning how to be with each other, including with others who come from different backgrounds and have different views [2]. I'd rather face the hard problem squarely and see what we can do about it together—even though this brings many cases that suck and feel awful.
Also, I don't think the community would like it. HN users would probably just keep posting until they got a thread where they could comment. I try not to fight the community in that way. Having made the mistake of doing so in the past, I can tell you that (1) you can't win, and (2) it is painful!
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[2] >>23308098 is a longer post about that if anyone wants more
The right place to look for consistency is at the level of moderation principles, and there I do think we've been consistent over the years. Do we apply the principles optimally? No. Do we mostly apply them ok? I hope so. If not, I probably shouldn't be doing this job.
There's another point which is important here. Unfortunately it's more subtle and I'm not sure I can explain it well but I'll try:
There is a temporal decay of interestingness in any sequence of related stories. Curiosity withers under repetition, so we can't have too much repetition [2], and that means we can't have too many predictable sequences [3].
When you have a sequence of related stories (S1, S2, ... Sn), once S1 has had significant attention, S2 becomes less interesting (in HN's sense of the word) until enough time goes by. This, for example, is why we downweight follow-ups [4]. Time counteracts repetition ("everything old is new again"), so letting enough time go by is one solution [5], but that takes longer than people usually want it to.
What this means is that we can't treat related stories consistently, because how interesting they are doesn't only depend on the story—it also depends on what else has been discussed recently. S2 might be a more important story than S1, but if they're related enough and S1 was discussed recently, then S2 becomes less interesting, qua HN topic, than it would have been absent that S1 thread. If you take seriously the principle of avoiding repetition, that is how we have to moderate. Otherwise the same few themes (the hottest ones) would dominate the site.
It is something of a lottery which story (S1 or S2) shows up first and so "wins". But if you only consider the articles, and not the sequence, this is inconsistent! "Why is S1 on-topic while S2 is not?" is inevitably a common question.
As moderators we're more concerned about the overall functioning of the site (e.g. not having too much repetition) than we are about specific stories. Users, on the other hand, are concerned with specific stories, and rightly so—why should they care about the global state of the site? It should just be there and be good enough.
This disconnect flares up when users are personally interested in S2 and don't see why S1 got to "win" and now S2 has to suffer. This is a consequence of mod attention and user attention being scoped at different levels. It's our job to care about the global state while users' job is to care about what interests them (specific stories). To a reader who cares specifically about S2 (and we all have our S2s), this feels like unfair prejudice.
To treat all stories consistently, we'd have to go back and rearrange the sequence (S1, S2, ..., Sn) over time. That's not doable, and from a moderation point of view, not so important either. There is an endless stream of stories in every category. Few matter much in the long run. We try to make sure that the major ones get discussed (e.g. right now, the launching of the $500B data center project and the Ross Ulbricht pardon) but that too is subjective. I'm sure that some commenters in this thread feel like the Musk video is more important than those.
What does all this mean? Maybe it means that people are right that the mods are inconsistent, error-prone, and biased, but a bit less so than at first appears.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[5] That's why HN allows reposts after a year or so (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).
> your attrition in moderating another post to your self-satisfaction was what encouraged you to make the decision to not even bother attempting with this one
It was, as I said, a secondary consideration. The primary ones are the ones I've spent much more time explaining, because they're primary. If they had pointed the other way then I would have gone against that preference in myself. I do agree with you about self-awareness, though; it is a precious thing and probably the most elusive one.
p.s. for selfish reasons I'd be curious to hear your take on >>42787306 , in which I attempted at unfortunate length to talk about this issue from a different angle. Don't read it unless you're actually interested though. It wouldn't be surprising if no one were; sometimes I just write these things to get them out of my system.
In that thread's comment, your “sequence” perspective makes sense; it’s clearly more complex than it looks from the outside, and I don’t envy the ontological challenge of deciding which submissions are repetitive or closely related. Still, from a user standpoint, it can feel inconsistent: sometimes S1 and S2 look almost identical, and the fact that S1 “won” first might be just because the earliest, most active users or moderators happened to see it and push it forward. After that, the community tends to gravitate toward S1 by default, so S2 never really gets a fair shake, even if it’s potentially more interesting or revealing. That's just c'est la vie.
But this thread feels like a good example of that mismatch. If S1 got topped while S2 was flagged or buried, and users are complaining in a relatively united way, maybe that’s a sign the initial choice favored the wrong post - or standing on the "offending" post (if no S1 is, in fact, present). Sometimes it’s worth re-checking whether the “winner-loser” framing actually got it right. A bit more leeway for topics that initially look flame like a flame war farm could reveal more thoughtful angles than expected, especially if the community is giving feedback that S2 might actually be the more worthwhile discussion (as we saw here - I think we're also seeing it in the Ross Ulbricht pardon thread: >>42787555 ).
Anyway, I appreciate the deeper look at how you’re handling these issues. It helps me see why certain threads get the bird! I think, especially for you and because of the stated mission of HN, that you believe - even more than me - that it's always a shame when we miss the better conversation.
> She named Elon after her American grandfather, John Elon Haldeman (born in Illinois).
You're wrong.
It's not going away: https://www.axios.com/2025/01/23/elon-musk-nazi-joke-adl
It's who and what he is: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/25/elon-musk...
It's who he wants to be.
