Why is this being hidden off of the main HN pages? There are clearly enough points for it to be significantly up weighted. I don’t understand the censorship.
As I understand it, HN has a controversial submission detection system of sorts. The exact details elude me, but if a submission gets a lot of comments quickly relative to upvotes, it'll fall off the main page.
Best indicator I've seen is if comments/points ~> 0.9 or so.
It's my understanding mods can undo this "controversial" flag, so that select threads get back onto the main page.
This site has always been easy to co-opt to fascism with their supposedly apolitical outlook. Flagging from unknown accounts easily kills stories of importance, even where they have relation to the supposed interests of the site. Such as the AI altered image being posted by the White House this week.
The idea we have to treat arguments in good faith like the other user in this story excusing fascist death squads show how well this moderation approach aligns with the Thiel-ite sympathies.
In the eyes of some in leadership, tech workers should be apolitical worker drones. Weighing in on politics is for people like David Sacks, Marc Andreesen, Elon Musk.
You are downvoting what is the evidence in front of your eyes. Downvoting the observation does not change the ranking anomaly. If you want trust, you can’t run the front page like this.
You’re being downvoted by bots. HN is rigged and completely compromised. We all need start flagging any non-political content and refuse to discuss anything but ICE. Business cannot continue as normal.
I understand why HN doesn't want to devolve into a political forum—but at it's spirit, HN is supposed to cover topics that "...are of interest to those working in the tech community". The upvotes on a thread like this demonstrates that these are topics that are indeed of interest—so I wish that there was more of an appetite to allow these discussions to play out. Maybe having a limit on the number of posts per day or per week that could make it to the frontpage could give everyone a bit more of what they want.
Personally, the political threads on HN are the ones in which I learn the most by and large. There simply isn't another community on the web that elicits such thought provoking discussion around these types of issues—reddit doesn't even come close. I hope the policy will change in the future; especially during these tumultuous times, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Most HN members are also well-educated enough to understand the implications of this scenario are more serious than the typical political article. Employment may start being affected, for example. The career decisions you make are already certainly affected if you choose to / choose not toto work somewhere that facilitates this federal agency.
This article is #1 on news.ycombinator.com/active right now. Obviously top of mind for a lot of us right now. Pretty hard to find it without the /active, though.
I think this is an open question still and very interesting. Ilya discussed this on the Dwarkesh podcast. But the capabilities of LLMs is clearly exponential and perhaps super exponential. We went from something that could string together incoherent text in 2022 to general models helping people like Terrance Tao and Scott Aaronson write new research papers. LLMs also beat IMO and the ICPC. We have entered the John Henry era for intellectual tasks...
Very spurious claims, given that there was no effort made to check whether the IMO or ICPC problems were in the training set or not, or to quantify how far problems in the training set were from the contest problems. IMO problems are supposed to be unique, but since it's not at the frontier of math research, there is no guarantee that the same problem, or something very similar, was not solved in some obscure manual.
The funny thing is that if you ask Claude if you should use email address as a primary key it will pretty adamantly warn you away from it:
> I'd recommend against using email as the primary key for a large LLM chat website. Here's why:
> Problems with email as primary key:
> 1. Emails change - Users often want to update their email addresses. With email as PK, you'd need to cascade updates across all related tables (chat sessions, messages, settings, etc.), which is expensive and error-prone
Well it does eliminate a whole list of problems related to account takeover, account recovery workflows, legal questions regarding which email owns the data, etc. Sometimes less is more. Secure, reliable, simple.
If anything, this makes account takeover and account recovery way more difficult. It probably makes a bunch of legal stuff easier for them, but that’s about it.
That's pretty obvious to anyone who had to maintain a high traffic site. Just the tip of the iceberg (I haven't included additional legal issues and other):
1.1 Strong protection against account takeover
Email change is one of the most abused recovery vectors in account takeover (ATO).
Eliminating email changes removes:
Social-engineering attacks on support
SIM-swap → email-change chains
Phished session → email swap → lockout of real user
Attacker must compromise the original inbox permanently, which is much harder.
1.2 No “high-risk” flows
Email change flows are among the highest-risk product flows:
Dual confirmation emails
Cooldown periods
Rollback windows
Manual reviews
Fixed email removes an entire class of security-critical code paths.
1.3 Fewer recovery attack surfaces
No need for:
“I lost access to my email” flows
Identity verification uploads
Support-driven ownership disputes
Every recovery mechanism is an attack surface; removing them reduces risk.
You're very wrong, because account takeover can still happen due to a compromised email account. People can and do permanently lose access to their email account to a third party.
Having worked in security on a fairly high profile, highly visible, largely used product — one of the fundamental decisions that paid off very well was intentionally including mechanisms to prevent issues with other businesses (like Google) from impacting user abilities for us.
Not having email change functionality would have been a huge usability, security, and customer service nightmare for us.
Regardless of anything else, not enabling users to change their email address effectively binds them to business with a single organization. It also ignores the fact that people can and do change emails for entirely opaque reasons from the banal to the authentically emergent.
ATO attacks are a fig leaf for such concerns, because you, as an organization, always have the power to revert a change to contact information. You just need to establish a process. It takes some consideration and table topping, but it’s not rocket science for a competent team.
What logical fallacy, exactly? I think you're perhaps misunderstanding the conversation. This translates just fine to your proposed analogy.
In your analogy, the claim would be that some online account is tied to a laptop and whoever possesses the laptop has access to that account. The online service does not permit the account owner to revoke access from that laptop and move the account to a different laptop. I stand by my statement that this would be a serious security hazard. Because yes, laptops can and do get hacked or stolen, just like email addresses.
Where your analogy isn't quite as strong is that at least you can generally add additional anti-theft protections such as full-disk encryption to a laptop, while with an email account generally 2FA is the best you can do.
> Attacker must compromise the original inbox permanently, which is much harder
This may need further analysis. I'd guess that a significant fraction of the people that want to change the email address that identifies them to a service want to do so because they have a new email address that they are switching to.
Many of those will be people who lose access to the old email address after switching. For example people who were using an email address at their ISP's domain who are switching ISPs, or people who use paid email hosting without a custom domain and are switching to a different email provider.
A new customer of that old provider might then be able to get that old address. You'd think providers would obviously never allow addresses used by former customers to be reused, but nope, some do. Even some that you'd expect to not do so, such as mailbox.org [1] and fastmail.com, allow addresses to be recycled.
I know, what’s so special about email? The common thing between your accounts, that the company that has a lot of chat history is allowing you not to change?
>When creating an account, please make sure you use an email you'll have long-term access to.
I'm just guessing, but the above might suggest a potential incentive: They would like you to hand over a valuable/longterm email, as opposed to a temporary email (for supposedly more privacy or testing), by making it difficult to change it later.
'Dark patterns are the pavement of todays corporate infrastructure.'
I can only assume there is some database structuring issue where things would potentially be broken if emails aren't update correctly, but I'm just guessing.
There’s a line in the book I quite liked: “All the interesting people disappear to San Francisco.” Was incredible to me that even back then, SF was known for its homosexual culture. Lord Henry was remarking on where Basil likely had disappeared, so the insinuation was that Basil felt more at home in SF.
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