Ask HN: is the pushdown of TSA backscatter stories algorithmic or manual?
Just curious. I noticed in the last 24 hours that stories with lots of up votes have been getting pushed down the page and off very quickly, way below stories with way lower votes and more time.
Note this is not a criticism if it is editorial judgement. I can see arguments either way for these stories being included on HN. But there are clearly reasonable arguments that this is an interesting issue with a strong technology angle that the community here is expressing interest in.
At the same time no one wants to see the site hijacked.
So my question is out of curiosity rather than complaint. If it is programmatic, it would be interesting to know if HN is modifying based on content topic profile or the karma of up voters or some other system.
19 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 64.9 ms ] threadLet me put the case in terms a government official would appreciate. Civil liberties are not just an ornament, or a quaint American tradition. Civil liberties make countries rich. If you made a graph of GNP per capita vs. civil liberties, you'd notice a definite trend. Could civil liberties really be a cause, rather than just an effect? I think so. I think a society in which people can do and say what they want will also tend to be one in which the most efficient solutions win, rather than those sponsored by the most influential people. Authoritarian countries become corrupt; corrupt countries become poor; and poor countries are weak. It seems to me there is a Laffer curve for government power, just as for tax revenues. At least, it seems likely enough that it would be stupid to try the experiment and find out. Unlike high tax rates, you can't repeal totalitarianism if it turns out to be a mistake.
This is why hackers worry. The government spying on people doesn't literally make programmers write worse code. It just leads eventually to a world in which bad ideas win. And because this is so important to hackers, they're especially sensitive to it. They can sense totalitarianism approaching from a distance, as animals can sense an approaching thunderstorm.
It would be ironic if, as hackers fear, recent measures intended to protect national security and intellectual property turned out to be a missile aimed right at what makes America successful. But it would not be the first time that measures taken in an atmosphere of panic had the opposite of the intended effect."
- from pg's essay: The Word "Hacker".
http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html
It seems to me (as a non-American) that America's default response to terrorism is to deprive itself of ever-more civil liberties. This is why I believe some on HN deem TSA articles HN-worthy material.
EDIT: Link
It's not just how America would respond. Almost any country would up security measures and, as a byproduct, deprive itself of civil liberties.
That's exactly wrong:
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/744199---israelifi...
It's not upping security, it's upping security in a way which increases safety, at minimum inconvenience to traveleres.
The US TSA bureaucracy, and its emphasis on scanning everything and everybody, and making everybody waste a lot of time, is dumb.
TSA "enhanced pat down" is basically what they do when they book people into jail, except there they do it with you naked. So the ironic part is if you refuse it, a few hours later they are probably going to be doing it to you anyway, just with you naked.
The more laws there are out there, the more likely you are breaking one, whether it's flying, taxes, etc. and then they get the "troublemakers" in the system no matter how innocent.
Far more clever than anything the KGB did iron-fisted eh?
Confirmation bias. The end.
It is one of the great challenges with any ranking system - how to moderate based on topic within a community of interest - so I thought it was worth raising.