https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/tv/2025/12/23/6...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/business/60-minutes-trump...
I also wonder if this story will get the type of leeway to stay on HN to collect the 200+ upvotes and 300+ comments of that previous example or if it will be flagged off the front page within minutes like so many other similar stories.
EDIT: No idea how long this post actually lasted, but checking in an hour later to see this has been flagged completely off the first 10 pages of HN despite getting close to that 200 point total.
[1] - >>23759283
> The Trump administration has repeatedly claimed that the men sent to El Salvador were overwhelmingly violent criminals; Pro Publica reported that the administration knew at least 197 of the men had not been convicted of crimes in the United States, and six had been convicted of violent offenses.
https://www.404media.co/archivists-posted-the-60-minutes-cec...
Tell HN: Paywalls with workarounds are OK; paywall complaints are off topic - >>10178989 - Sept 2015 (160 comments)
This is disgraceful [0], whatever your opinion on illegal immigration.
[0] deporting non-citizens to 3rd-party countries/prisons
CBS defends pulling 60 Minutes segment about Trump deportations
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdrnv3keeneo
or
‘60 Minutes’ Pulled a Segment. A Correspondent Calls It ‘Political.’
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/business/60-minutes-trump...
289 points by grahamlee 5 days ago | flag | past | 171 comments
But: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=404media.co sure has a lot of [dead]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning
If you want to break this you have to know the person and ask key questions afterwards. Their distortion field is held together by beliefs and principles, not empirical analysis.
For instance, for my father, the question "how is this treating people responsibly? How can we expect the behavior of those guards to be held accountable?" would pierce this ... but really you have to know how the person doing motivated reasoning thinks.
See perhaps United States Declaration of Independence:
> "For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offenses:"
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievances_of_the_United_State...
https://x.com/thesimonetti/status/2003142908854313225
They seem reasonable. The person doing this 60 minute segment has also pushed false stories in the past, which make her concern more relevant.
Why do people think we're motivated to “suppress” negative stories about A16Z? They've been criticized forever here and we've never had a problem with it. All we care about is whether a topic makes for an interesting discussion on HN.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I’m still using it happily on windows/linux.
Don’t forget your vpn!
If you can stomach it, propublica has been covering stories like this since the summer [1].
Meanwhile, the MS13 has been cutting sweetheart deals with Bukele [2] and we have been releasing actual gang members for the privilege of sending innocent people to the torture facilities [3, 4], even in the face of reports of USAID being diverted to the gang for a money-for-votes scheme for Bukele [5].
[1]https://www.propublica.org/article/venezuelan-men-cecot-inte...
[2]https://www.propublica.org/article/ambassador-ronald-johnson...
[3]https://oversightdemocrats.house.gov/news/press-releases/ran...
[4]https://www.npr.org/2025/10/21/nx-s1-5580555/why-the-state-d...
[5]https://www.propublica.org/article/bukele-trump-el-salvador-...
>"The hottest campaign stop is this Salvadoran supermax: House Republican Riley Moore went to the super maximum security prison in El Salvador to take some photos in front of the inmates. “I just toured the CECOT prison in El Salvador,” he writes, with pictures of him giving a thumbs-up, shirtless inmates standing at attention behind him. Moore gave a double thumbs-up in front of the men, densely packed in their cold metal bunk. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem took the same tour recently, posting a fun video in front of caged, tatted men."
>"After Bukele left the White House, he thirstily tweeted, “I miss you already, President T.” Trump returned the favor, learning to say MAGA in Spanish: “¡America grande, otra vez!”"
Etc. And she's been very positive on Bukele personally as well. Might be multiple reasons she'd gleefully want to spike such a story even if the commands of her owners take precedent.
Edit: whew, this one sure triggered the technofeudalists and Baristans! From 3 to -3 for her own publication's and her statements.
----
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/woke-right...
RTings recently updated their reviews and seems to agree:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalief_Browder
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/nyregion/kalief-browder-c...
The specific lines about Ellison and a lawnmower start at 38:28 in the linked video; the entire Oracle rant starts at about 34:00.
https://www.npr.org/2025/07/02/nx-s1-5290171/trump-lawsuit-p...
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/least-cor...
https://www.newsweek.com/accused-capitol-rioters-could-spend...
Or, does this not count for ideological reasons? There are at least some people out there that may be consistent despite tribalism, I suppose.
Okay well I basically copy/pasted from ftc.gov:
The FTC’s Bureau of Competition enforces the nation's antitrust laws, which form the foundation of our free market economy. The antitrust laws promote the interests of consumers; they support unfettered markets and result in lower prices and more choices.
https://www.ftc.gov/about-ftc/bureaus-offices/bureau-competi...
The Bureau of Competition is committed to preventing mergers and acquisitions that are likely to reduce competition and lead to higher prices, lower quality goods or services, or less innovation
To me, Bari’s response is a manufactured cover up. I’ve followed Bari for years and seen the progression from someone who was a balanced moderate to someone who is slowly developing a strong bias and letting the mask off a little bit at a time. The recent Turning Point townhall was the first big revelation of her bias to the public. But as someone who subscribed to her for years, I’ve seen the progression over time. And the language in here feels less like her usual journalism and more like something carefully put together to deflect.
As for the actual reason - here is what was shared by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Stelter
Stories don't always get the chance to gather the sufficient amount of up votes before being nipped in the bud by dissatisfied flaggers though, depending on the time of day. Some of them, like >>46357887 , clearly had great interest here and got a large number of upvotes that was, nonetheless, insufficient to prevent the flagging.
The submission you linked to (>>46357887 ), however, was not that kind of story (i.e. one which the majority of users want to see on the frontpage). Rather, it was the kind of story that some users want to see on the front page, but not the majority of users*.
It's the latter class of story which is more vulnerable to flags. That's generally what we want in a flagging system, and I think most HN users would agree with that in principle (though not of course in specific cases where the story is something that one personally finds interesting).
* This is predictable from its skeleton, btw: "person X says provocative thing Y about divisive topic Z" is usually not significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...)
Above is #19; see #18:
> "For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Jury trial:"
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievances_of_the_United_State...
(At least not mine, which are old and almost obsolete but have enough RAM)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KTorrent / https://apps.kde.org/ktorrent/
Otherwise follow the links from there to qBitTorrent, or its mentions from other commenters here. Am not fond of transmission at all. Feels slow and sluggish in comparison.
I assumed this thread had been axed and manually reapproved. Probably likewise for some of the other people posting inb4s.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/article/cbs-news-says-global-mi...
If by 'ran the original episode' you mean on TV: no, they didn't, but they did put it on their 'app'.
Considering how much Trump is screwing with Canada, maybe it was someone's small act of revenge.
-- Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776
More significantly, one of the first discussions within the text of precisely what wealth is (on which Smith has several, and occasionally inconsistent, answers, and which he seems to think of as more a flow than a stock.)
One of Smith's principle complaints in his text was what we now call "market failures" and "regulatory capture".
<https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/...>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ha-Joon_Chang#Kicking_Away_the...>
Recent US tariffs fall rather short on most of these points, of course.
EDIT: See, ABC's Matt Rivers was /inside/. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ol0dcwHCb8Q
I thought he did a great job.
I'd love to hear what others that have seen both think since I'll want to put aside some time to watch this one after all the holiday hustle and bustle are done.
I think it's a great model based on what Nick's tour showed.
From everything we've seen, flags on political stories are a coalition between (1) users who don't want to see (most) political stories on HN, and (2) users who don't like the politics of a particular story they are flagging. In other words, users who care about the quality of the site, and users who care about a political struggle. (Edit: I mean users who are on one side of a political struggle and only flag stories that are on the opposite political side, in other words who use flags as a purely political weapon.)
This dynamic shows up on all the main political topics.
There are some accounts that abuse flags in the following sense: they only ever flag political stories, and their flags are always aligned with the same political position. When we see accounts doing that, we usually take away their flagging rights.
This, so far, seems sufficient to me. If we start to see indications that it's not sufficient, we'll take more action.
I know there are many users (actually a small-but-vocal subset of users) who complain that flags are being abused to suppress political stories. What these complaints seem never to take into account is that we want most political stories to be flagged on HN, for a critical reason: if they weren't, then HN would turn into a current-affairs site, and that would not be HN at all.
From the point of view of HN fulfilling its mandate (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), the status quo around flagging is not so awful—it is within (let's say) a standard deviation of the desired state: most (though not all) political stories either fail to make the frontpage or get flagged off the frontpage.
That's the desired outcome, not because such stories are unimportant—often they're far more important than anything that does stay on the frontpage—but because HN is trying to be a particular kind of site. Food is more important than toys, but that doesn't mean there's no place for toy stores, or that toy stores should dedicate more shelf space to food. It doesn't mean that toy stores are suppressing food! or that toy store proprietors don't care about food or don't think people should have any.
When we become aware of a political story that is being flagged off the frontpage even though it fits HN's criteria for being on-topic (e.g.: contains significant new information, has some overlap with intellectual curiosity, has a chance of a substantive discussion, and there haven't been too many political stories on HN recently), then we turn off flags. This is the best strategy I know, so far, for balancing the frontpage according to HN's mandate.
If you (<-- I don't mean you personally, of course, but any HN user) want us to change how this works, you'd need an argument that engages with why we don't want most political stories on HN's frontpage. That is, your argument would need to proceed from what kind of website HN is trying to be, and trying not to be. That's the fundamental point.
Instead, most arguments I hear are concerned with the behavior of flaggers, whether they're "politically motivated" (i.e. are against the political causes that someone personally identifies with), whether they are "unfairly suppressing discussion" or not, and so on. None of this engages with the fundamental point. I don't want to say we "don't care about any of that as long as the overall outcome is achieved", but I do think (1) it's secondary, and (2) we would be foolish to make changes that made HN do worse by its mandate. I'm only interested in changes that make HN better for its intended purpose.
After many discussions with users making such objections [1], I get the feeling that they have a mistaken idea of what principles HN operates by, or think it should operate by different principles. The principle they seem to favor is that submissions should simply be ranked according to upvotes. The stories that get the most upvotes are the ones that people care most about, and those should be the ones on the frontpage. Anything else is unfair — is censorship, putting a thumb on the scale, and so on. That is the view implied, and often expressed, in these discussions.
There are a ton of reasons why HN doesn't work this way and is designed not to. The most important is simply that if it did, it would be a different site. The frontpage would consist of the hottest and most sensational/indignant topics, and yes, plenty more would be political. But it wouldn't be HN. We're optimizing for something else entirely, and there's no way that this kind of site can work by upvotes alone. [2]
Flagging on HN is part of this optimization effort, so if you want to change how flags work, you'd need to show how it would move the site closer to this optimum—the goal we have, rather than some other goal that we don't have. HN is far from that optimum, so there is room for improvement. But we can't optimize for two things.
---
[1] I had a long, unfortunately unsuccessful, exchange with a user about this yesterday: >>46367653
[2] If anyone wants to understand this better, here are some entrypoints to past explanations:
We're trying to optimize for intellectual curiosity - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
HN can't operate by upvotes alone - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
HN is not a current affairs site - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The job of moderation is to jig the system out of its failure modes - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[1] >>38275396