More Zhongnanhai-ology from our cold warrior correspondent.
As usual I feel like he overestimates the US' ability to impose rules and underestimates the Chinese ability to both circumvent those rules while developing self sufficiency. In addition we've all seen the Chinese ability to retaliate across a range of industrial sectors from rare earths to drug precursors. While these embargos would have some impact on Chinese chip development; initiatives like Huawei Ascend clusters and DeepSeek being trained on less powerful chips show that China will find a way to innovate whether or not they have access to the most powerful chips.
I feel like the piece overstates the importance of the AI race specifically. The recent field tests of the US' automated weapons systems are... not encouraging. [0][1] Unless you're an AGI booster that rather implies that crucial ability of US tech that China is missing is being able to generate Sora videos of fat people causing disasters.
In light of the 15th 5 year plan and its focus on self sufficiency without reference to the West these China hawks are increasingly irrelevant to the conversation unfolding outside the borders of the increasingly irrelevant and mistrusted US.
Correct, in every thread about BYD or other car manufacturers people seem to forget about the other 7.5 billion people in the world outside of the US and Europe. Sure the US' broken dealership laws and red-scare tantrums will stop these cars selling there, and in their economic satraps, but for the global majority countries there's no such barrier.
The cheerleaders for the current authoritarian coup that swarm around here are all too happy to conflate the Hunter Biden pardon and what's currently going on. As if we can't currently open a god-damned news website and read about the Comey, James and Bolton prosecutions and deduce that, yeah, Biden pretty much had no choice even though it was a shitty thing to do.
This is because these dipshits are eagerly carrying water for a vindictive dictator. They are not operating in good faith but due to the alignment of the owners of this site with those self-same fascists you are meant to act as if they're not trolls.
Funnily enough just like guns the reactions in this thread seem to more or less be "no way to stop this says only nation where this happens regularly".
Best as I can tell, and I'm just some guy, is there is a real problem with the job market, not just in the US. AI is mainly interesting for the media to report on and hype for CEOs and the kind of MBA airheads no one with any self respect should pay attention to. It's a fairly cool search, synthesis and retrieval tool with real value but it's not as impactful as 'thoughtleaders' want us to believe.
In the US as elsewhere it's a combination of factors, COVID overhiring and inflation, interest rates going up, market concentration and, US specific, the since Trump-reversed Trump-imposed tax changes. While this reversal probably helps the job market some in the immediate term the indicators of the fundamentals are flashing red everywhere and outside of the US it all just continues to be part of the same Omnirecession since 2008.
Worth reiterating since the phrase "attacks on institutions" more usually implies bureaucratic maneuvers. These people have incited actual murderous gun attacks: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj0y796qqp9o
Thanks for providing some food for thought on the specifics of the proposal. These are real and justified drawbacks. My interest is more in access to the flagging behavior in aggregate rather than campaigns against any specific person. But this being the internet it certainly creates a new avenue for deranged people to kick off. However does the risk of this hypothetical hate campaign:
a) exceed the likelihood of people doing this via commenting anyway
b) justify the opaque and powerful nature of flagging as-is
Perhaps you stopping flagging if you're not willing to justify a flag is a good outcome in aggregate? We have mods to kill threads which violate the guidelines already. But looking at the /active list there's certainly an amount of (probably organic) censorship of controversial threads in either direction (though my gut feel is it biases more towards censorship of articles about the latest outrages of US government).
I'm not really interested in say, Ruby, I think people should probably use languages which are type-safe if they want to avoid catastrophes in production and 1am pager calls. However if I see an article about Ruby I'm just going to not engage with it. Perhaps your existing interpretation of the unwritten rules is too broad and actually we ought to rein in the amount of flagging anyway?
We're in total disagreement. I say "yes" to both "a" and "b" and I do not think that people flagging less is a good outcome. Same goes for vouching.
I think a lot of us are generally happy with how the site operates—that's why we're here. I personally consider the moderation to be a feature—I think dang and team do a great job. I'm sure you could pick out some counterexamples but comments and posts that rise to the top tend to be thoughtful. There are exceptions. Nobody bats 1.000.
Posters don't have a right to be seen/read. That said, there are plenty of other communities that will embrace the types of posts/threads that would get flagged here.
If you have specific concerns about specific comments/stories getting flagged, it's reasonable to take each one up with the moderation team privately (there's a contact link in the footer). Just don't badger them—becoming a nuisance won't help you achieve your goals.
But the exact reason for flagging per-person is kind of orthogonal to this request right? It's a request for transparency. You are able to override other people's interest in discussing topics for no real personal cost. Is there any drawback to you having those flags be on the public record? Or any reason not to make those flags public? Why exactly should flagging be private.
I think a lot of people agree with your reasons for flagging and wish politics didn't cross over into tech, but that doesn't really impinge either way on making flags public. (In the example article that prompted this a debate about the relative benefits of different vaccine research approaches seems patently tech/science based, but again it is not really relevant to a proposal to make the flags public record).
For better or worse, HN is a moderate site. If anything, the moderators should protect submissions from being flagged if they think it is unfair or the system itself should stop things from being flagged if it has been “vouched” for, or upvoted by HN users with high karma.
I'm not actually sure what the karma threshold is for flagging, I've already crossed it on this which is my alt account.
Perusing active at the moment it looks like a fairly quiet time for flagging, though the example didn't get to active so it's a lopsided sample. The flagged articles are roughly:
- UBI doesn't work because the poor are lazy
- 2 different aliens/UFOs related articles
- Zohran Mamdani and reaction of tech scene in NYC
- Israeli settler violence in the west bank
I don't really see a compelling argument that any of these except perhaps west bank violence is worthy of a flag. We have tools to deal with these topics already such as the front page fall off for flame wars. I don't think the site is enhanced by flagging in it's current state and absent a larger change like increasing the flag karma to be closer to vouch karma so recovery is less lopsided, I think at least being transparent about flagging helps restore confidence in the system and would help reduce conspiracy thinking.
I'm not too interested in the reasons for flagging since they don't currently exist and would be self reported and largely irrelevant. I'm more interested in just seeing a list of the users who flagged and the times they flagged.
This would allow anyone to perform network analysis and reporting and full audit ability and is a minimal level of accountability for using this functionality to close discussions down.
>This would allow anyone to perform network analysis and reporting and full audit ability and is a minimal level of accountability for using this functionality to close discussions down.
And what would be the purpose of this? "Audits" are meaningless when you have no ability to affect procedures.
The mods already have this data and they already choose to allow what they will. Neither you or I or anyone else has the right to hold anyone here accountable for their behavior - indeed, the guidelines explicitly prohibit doing so in most cases, because it makes for "boring reading."
As usual I feel like he overestimates the US' ability to impose rules and underestimates the Chinese ability to both circumvent those rules while developing self sufficiency. In addition we've all seen the Chinese ability to retaliate across a range of industrial sectors from rare earths to drug precursors. While these embargos would have some impact on Chinese chip development; initiatives like Huawei Ascend clusters and DeepSeek being trained on less powerful chips show that China will find a way to innovate whether or not they have access to the most powerful chips.
I feel like the piece overstates the importance of the AI race specifically. The recent field tests of the US' automated weapons systems are... not encouraging. [0][1] Unless you're an AGI booster that rather implies that crucial ability of US tech that China is missing is being able to generate Sora videos of fat people causing disasters.
In light of the 15th 5 year plan and its focus on self sufficiency without reference to the West these China hawks are increasingly irrelevant to the conversation unfolding outside the borders of the increasingly irrelevant and mistrusted US.
[0]: https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/us-navy-i...
[1]: https://www.techbuzz.ai/articles/anduril-s-autonomous-weapon...
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