We have simply discussed the surveillance scandal enough. There's just nothing more we can say or do that will matter right now. When Americans here go vote in November, maybe they will remember. Maybe they won't. Either way, the horse is long since deceased and partially liquefied.
My suggestion may sound silly at first, but I think it serves a real need. We, as in Paul Graham, the moderators, and the community consensus, have twice now (first SOPA, then spying) decided that such-and-such political issue is important enough to the technical community that it deserves to be discussed and mentioned. When that happens, the the moderators can slightly change the board style to indicate that discussions relevant to the present crisis are acceptable -- maybe a black border and lettering on the Y symbol at the top-left. When the controversy ends, the board style changes back, and just this second signal is the important one: it means that we are done, it is over, if you want to keep discussing politics do it somewhere else.
I, like you, appreciate the possibility of a board devoted entirely to technical content, but the reality is that sometimes it may just not be feasible, here, Slashdot, or anywhere else. It is far better to have a system in place to keep such discussions under control than to pretend they won't happen at all. Because they have, more than once, and they will again. Occasional, specific discussions of events involving the tech community may be important simply because, in small amounts, they facilitate cohesion among the members by drawing our attention to things that may affect us as a whole. But the important part is occasional and specific.
Any community devoted to research and development, like HN, faces the challenge of living in the present while building the future. Our priority should always be the latter, even though we are part of the present world, and occasionally we find the present needs us. But the future needs us more.
The opposite is true.
For too long the minimal to zero reporting these issues have received in the majority of news outlets was met with an abundance of silence and indifference. Outside of a few communities on the net (and fewer offline), there hasn't been discussion on these issues. The Guardian finally breaks one story that manages to have legs for a week or two in the mainstream press and we're done here?
No. Just no.
>I, like you, appreciate the possibility of a board devoted entirely to technical content...
This has never been the case for HN, nor was it ever an ideal for HN:
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
From the first line of the first question about submission guidelines: On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups.
While most (read: not all) political posts are discouraged, the discussions around surveillance have been more technical here than anywhere, and it would be hard to conceive of a discussion with a political element being more on-topic and imperative than the discussions of late.
As someone brilliantly put it in a recent thread: I assume you have taken some space from your company's meetings for discussing the NSA, SOPA and related subjects every day?
I don't believe I ignored anything, and where I was responding to the poster and the discussion, I quoted him/her so it would be clear what points I was responding to.
If you have something specific to say, spell it out and maybe I can answer it for you.
And let's not get started about the legal acumen of the site as a whole.
This site has basically one method of digesting technical information about surveillance: catalog the competing claims, choose the one that assumes the most spectacular abuse by the state, and fiercely defend it regardless of evidence. It's also trivially game-able, which is I suspect a fact not lost on commenters like 'mtgx. The site isn't merely the boy who cried wolf; but rather a boy with a wolf-oriented case of Tourette's.
Poor analysis by some of the users (there are a lot of non-technical commenters on here) doesn't negate the higher degree of technical discussion that has indeed been present here. Just because opinion and fallacious arguments are present doesn't mean that good technical discussion isn't. Outside of dedicated infosec communities, I am not sure what online community has had more purely technical discussion on these issues over time. Feel free to list them though, because without sarcasm, I would be happy to know of them.
Is there a clear solution to stopping it? No? Do we know the extent of what the NSA's doing? No? Then we haven't discussed it enough.
This is a historically unprecedented issue. In no period in history has any state has anything akin to this power. This issue is more important than your distaste at seeing content you're not interested in.
During the two week "freak out", I saw a lot of linkbait about the NSA having massive conspiracies, but I saw relatively fewer actual comments where people were clearly being swayed by anti-government sentiment. For every comment I read that was outlandish, fallacious and clearly media spoon-fed, I have to say I can recall a thread of people saying, "No, that doesn't make sense, you're trying to disprove a negative", etc.
tl;dr - My point here is that I think the baseline intelligence of Hacker News is higher than we might think it is just by observing the front page, and that there are actually a lot more savvy people gaming the front page who are just driven by a relative few who act as the passionate, vocal majority.
That's just my opinion. I could be wrong. But I like to think there's a lot of under the radar intellectual activity, and people are just being really opportunistic for karma or some such.
As for legal acumen, I agree completely - I don't have nearly as much as, for example, 'rayiner. But that's exactly why we have people with niche expertise or domain knowledge. It's a real problem when people get frenzied and decide they know Constitution without having read it.
I haven't been here as long, but I believe that we have sampling bias from the hugely outspoken minority who know it's trendy to be anti-state.
EDIT: I want to submit my experience about the site being gameable - it's true it's easy to get the top comment for news stories that are heavily politically loaded, but I have to say it's easy to karma farm even if you're not anarchist/cynical/conspiracy mongering. I do not try to game the forum to get high comments, but I can still personally attest to having some top comments in the high 40s during the NSA scandal while being incredibly vocal against the "popular opinion" that Google was directly aiding the government. I probably had the top comment on at least half of those stories, arguing against the tone of the story profusely. I don't have a sockpuppet ring, so those numbers of people who upvoted me are to the best of my knowledge genuine. They may not have been as vocal in their agreement with me as the detractors who replied to my comments, but they certainly exist.
I guess I just want to try to dispel pessimism. I don't think all is lost regarding the political climate of Hacker News :)
Maybe more political discussion is needed, but Hacker News is not the place for this to happen. Where is the line drawn? Should we discuss alarming health issues like sodium consumption, GMOs, sweeteners? The military industry? The lobby complex? Violence and misery in Africa? Are these less important than the Prism scandal?
The parent comment says X, the one below says the opposite, and then someone says X again. Do people click and write mainly to get karma? Should posting also cost karma?
The longer you write the easier it is to say something that's not true and harder for people to follow it accurately.
(I know I'm guilty of this.)
I'm going to disagree with the highlighted portion. On pretty much any topic related to law and government, HN in the aggregate is willfully ignorant - people rarely take the time to do research or provide citations, but go about declaring this or that to be illegal or unconstitutional with no evidence and frequently without even fielding an argument. The discussions here are as bad as the comment section at, say, the Huffington Post. A lot of people seem to think that because they're handy with computers they have special insight into every other intellectual topic. This is, sadly, not the case.
Exactly. Which is why I referenced the FAQ which states that most political discussion is discouraged and articulated precisely how and why this debate is not one of those times.
> The NSA discussion is way past the point where it's interesting to most people.
I think you meant "to me." Judging from the post rankings, frequency, and comment scores, people in this community are interested and engaged in this topic, -more than most. For now anyway.
>Maybe more political discussion is needed, but Hacker News is not the place for this to happen. Where is the line drawn? Should we discuss alarming health issues like sodium consumption, GMOs, sweeteners? The military industry? The lobby complex? Violence and misery in Africa? Are these less important than the Prism scandal?
As detailed in the FAQ, this is precisely the place for this to happen. Political posts are allowed, and if you can't see how discussion about surveillance software that taps the communications of the entire globe is on topic here, even with the (completely within-framework) political element, then I don't know what to tell you. The problem isn't HN and the other users though. I think you're just tired of seeing it and will be happier in a few more news cycles when it likely dies down like it always has.
But...I do agree with you. It becomes harder to sift through facts when a post is very long. I do it because I enjoy writing long prose on topics I'm interested in - I don't think it's particularly correlated with getting high karma. I've seen very high comments that consist of a little paragraph (albeit packed with technical information).
But I think a lot of people do just click and write for karma. As long as there is a karma system, this is somewhat unavoidable. I really wish we could do away with the entire karma system entirely, but your suggestion about posts "costing" karma sounds really neat, I'd definitely test that on a small forum...not sure how you'd deal with throwaways though, and how would new users accrue karma?
If you look at the timeline, the CIA had such a spectacular failure that an ambassador was raped to death and Hilary Clinton kicked to the curb. Almost simultaneously the IRS was caught embezzling money from anti-statist campaigns.
Every time those stories threatened to gain traction, every leftist organ would run another 48 point headline about Snowden or the NSA. The coincidences piled up until it is impossible that the NSA story's popularity was not largely a political creation, and just barely might be a false flag operation to punish the intel community.
Likewise, I was downvoted to oblivion every time I pointed out that the NSA story was not a revelation, that it wasn't even news. My first awareness of the NSA was their Echelon spying efforts, where it was openly discussed that they wanted to vacuum up all the worlds' communications. The weakness of the DES cipher was widely recognized to be a NSA plot to make it easy to intercept domestic comms. The Clipper chip and key escrow programs were a naked domestic snooping plan. This was widely covered by the trade press, a fair bit by the mainstream media, exhaustively by Slashdot and Ars Technica, and obsessively by the Computer Underground Digest, the Hacker News Network, the Cipherpunks, Telecom Digest, and many others.
Hacker News has also started importing the Reddit Censorship ethos. Downvoting rings censor many politically correct or just unpopular comments, comments that in many cases are correct but counterintuitive. The endless September seems to have finally arrived at HN.
This has been disappointing, not because I expect everyone to be lawyer, but because I expect HN commenters to be able to use an internet search engine. It'd be one thing to miss details that you need years of training to understand correctly, but a huge proportion of the comments in these threads strongly suggest that the person posting them has not spent even five minutes researching the subject they're posting on, and yet has somehow arrived at strong opinions on the subject anyway.
What HN could use is a bit less knee jerking towards belief based discussion, and a bit more analysis: we have these two claims, assuming both parties are self interested, could both be true, and if so, how.
I see "of course Google is/isn't giving server logins" but I don't see as much "here are ways a third party could get data directly from servers, for these various definitions and implementations of 'directly'."
That stuff does get said here more than other places I'm reading, but still clearly not enough as I haven't yet seen that kind of analysis get noticed and picked up by the reporters increasingly sourcing their tech digests from here.
Thank you.
But it didn't before, as best I can tell. The switchover seemed to happen in 2013, but it wasn't Snowden's leaks that caused me to notice the change.
I still disagree on this (but wouldn't downvote you for expressing that opinion).
I now design and review systems with the assumption that the GPA (global passive adversary) is real. It's not a political thing; it's an observation of technical reality.
To explain why that is a shift in thinking, note that basically every web-site password reset mechanism in the world (apart from those that employ 2FA) is broken in this scenario.
Sensible people cannot expect Tor to provide the fig-leaf of safety it seemed like it offered.
GPA was not a default assumption in threat models before.
That's doubtful. http://www.snopes.com/politics/military/stevens.asp
At least HN is a place where (presumably) there are users informed enough to set the record straight, rather than having the theories perpetuate. As someone who frequents Reddit, I appreciate that much.
>The site isn't merely the boy who cried wolf; but rather a boy with a wolf-oriented case of Tourette's.
I almost hate coming here now, for that reason. Which makes me sad.
I feel that you've highlighted a possible underlying cause of HN's present malaise, which is: many community members here are poorly connected on the Internet. HN is an open website, which means that it is very easy for someone who is new to the Internet to find and browse. If you've been commenting a lot in the recent political threads, I can make the following predictions: you've participated in online fora for less than ten years, and you don't pursue social connections much deeper than reddit user flair.
If you would like to take part in a lot of technical and political discussions regarding surveillance, you should consider joining a newsgroup or mailing list (if there still are any, I know politech and cypherpunks are dead) specifically devoted to this discussion. Usenet requires a modicum of effort (and maybe a subscription fee) to participate, which can help to limit the discussion to serious contribution by serious participants. You may also want to subscribe to and comment on blogs by people who know about these things, so you can get to know people and contribute to a discussion that, in order to be any good, must stretch on far longer than a single comment thread. There are communities devoted to this sort of discussion.
The content-link plus tree-style-comments format of HN is good for day-long free-form discussion on lighthearted issues of interest to technical people. It is not suited for deep, long-term discussion of complex political issues. HN can't be usefully political even if it wants to be, any more than HN can be used to design novel methods of quantum error correction. Some things just aren't suited for the HN style of discussion.
The amount of horribly bad posts on HN has reached a proportion where they're no longer exceptions, they characterize the site as a whole.
Personally I've noticed my participation drop in the last few months because of this. There are fewer and fewer people interested in engaging in a discussion, and more and more religious zealotry where it's clear poster has zero interest in opposing views, and will stoop consistently to hostility and fundamental indecency when confronted.
To me, not as much. The most poignant catalyst, at least in recent times, to me, was Aaron Swartz. It’s just grown from there.
Maybe. You also clearly have a bias towards finding these interesting, so it's a moot point.
Taking rankings at face value is not ideal; there is a feedback loop, political posts are likely to engage an audience that likes and upvotes them, and bring more users with that profile to the site. Taking that to the extreme, you could have porn links take over HN in just a few hours if you let them through. It's a matter of setting directions, not catering to everyone's needs.
I don't know if giving that much more power to older posters is necessarily the answer, although it might help reinforce the perception of the community maintaining a certain tone in discussion, if the same posters are more likely to be heard and heard more often. On the other hand, with that scenario, karma would actually mean something (though that just brings up the possibility of karma-farming posts.)
And you ignored the other half of my comment, about how the NSA story is not news. It is merely new to excitable young people who mistake unfamiliarity for exposé. If I can convice them to take the red pill, they will learn that parts of signals intelligence are profoundly more important than even the astroturf claims, and at the same time more mundane.
Maybe I'm the problem, but I'm not going to change. I just don't have the resources to be 100% right every time I say things online.
About the other stuff, I only recently realized that the IRS scandal, the US spy who was caught in Russia, and Benghazi have basically disappeared from the news, while the one thing that the White House has the least control over and is the most distanced from is the one that is now most talked about.
Another thing to think about is that when the IRS story broke, a lot of new agencies were calling it a "controlled or planned leak" meaning that the white house and IRS had coordinated on how and when to break the story, timing it with new info on Benghazi for information-overload, and finally Snowden was just a freebie, while I'm sure they're not happy about the facts coming to light, nothing internally will really change, they'll continue spying on us, they'll just be more careful who they allow to access the information.
Worse is legal case findings which for whatever reason, the media did not pick up. Take the statement that in Swedish law, people who produce or run a webservice can be made liable if the majority of users use the service for illegal purposes? That facts is basically impossible to find using a search, even through it is written plainly as a simple Q&A in the appeal court judgment of the TPB trial. If the case had been that I forgot where I read it, a search query would not have helped me in tracking it down.
From that, I can only ask if you are arguing against a honest intellectual discussion, based on facts as well as rational arguments in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive?
In this specific case of "direct access", the facts are the few press-release made, the leaked slides, and any contributing leaked report. The rational arguments is mostly around the definition of "direct access". The truth is thus depended on the quality of the facts, and the derived result of discussing the rational arguments.
Is this bad for HN, and if so, what should be done about it?
I agree NSA's slides are not innuendo. Neither were BigCom denials. To me it seems reconciling those is neither a rebuttal nor a retreat, it's advancing the conversation from two disputing sides (NSA lying vs corporate collusion) to a third "this is likely what's meant, as seen in multiple concrete cases from 2006 to today, and makes sense of currently available info."
The 19 July story by Pete Ashdown, CEO of XMission, disclosing one in flight data capture practice well known to the data center community, was not abstract. The latest xkeyscore reveal fits this model as well.
"Are they or aren't they" isn't the most productive debate to have anyway. If they aren't, they could, and if the end result is the same, what should we do about it?
As you suggest, the discussions in this area I do appreciate at HN are on what honest rational policy should be, and on how technologists can assist in ensuring trust in confidentiality and non-repudiation in the cloud of services HNers are building.
With politics, there seems to be no such restraint.
Now it is just about too late. For the next 10-20 years, national infosec policy will be driven by the radicals' memory of their principled stand against the NSA "revelations". "Abuses" will be "curtailed" without regard for legitimate security needs.
The is no elsewhere to reserve this discussion for. If HN is credulous enough to believe staged CNN sound bites, there is no hope for other venues.