Several previous submissions and two previous discussions on this same topic (one with 14 comments and one with 70 comments). All in the last few hours.
Maybe this one will stick this time. I see people are flagging it heavily.
I vouched it, because it's a worthy discussion to have, and it should stay up so people can see it.
The other two were knocked off the top 20+ pages within a few minutes, you'd only notice it if you got lucky.
@dang, can we have an intervention here? Maybe merge the two other dupes together and allow the discussion to be had? People clearly want to talk about it.
I don’t understand why anyone would flag it. Yea it’s definitely worth having and worse case scenario it’s proven to be a suicide. But on the off chance it wasn’t it deserves to be looked into and companies shouldn’t be allowed to silence these things
Flagging is used in a bizarre way on HN that is more akin to censorship. This should only be flagged if it was found that this article was fraudulent and incorrect and he didn’t say that in my opinion. Everything else should be handled by upvotes and downvotes.
I found this info interesting in a Reddit aviation thread. It helps with the tinfoil hat feelings.
>He was not testifying against Boeing for anything to do with their planes. He already did that and has been public about it since 2019. This deposition was for the appeal for his own civil defamation case against Boeing, which he orginially lost. So Boeing was not threatened by his testimony in anyway. Even if they lost the case or settled, it would be a drop in the bucket compared to the harm he has already caused them and other legal issues they are already having...
To the best of my knowledge, his civil case revolves around his claim that Boeing retaliated against him for his whistleblowing. "Company that cut corners on safety found to have retaliated against whistleblower" certainly seems like it would have a pretty significant impact on PR and stock price.
According to dang: “The purpose of flagging is to indicate that a story does not belong on HN.” [0] It’s valid to think that a topic that is essentially just gossip and speculation does not belong on HN. See also the “Off-Topic” section in the guidelines [1].
>This should only be flagged if it was found that this article was fraudulent and incorrect and he didn’t say that in my opinion.
Okay then it should be flagged by your reasoning, did you read the article?
Because there's no proof in it that he ever said it. A woman who refused to identify herself past a first name claims he said it.
A sibling comment convinced me, this was probably flagged correctly. Not that the title statement is not important, but that this piece specifically is an especially shallow article and not up to standards.
Submissions cannot be downvoted. They can only be upvoted or flagged. Flagging is the tool we have for off-topic submissions.
Comments can be upvoted, downvoted, or flagged. There, voting may be used to express agreement and disagreement, but flagging should only be used for comments that violate the site's guidelines.
Okay I'm not interested in participating in this community anymore. It's an incredibly stupid way to handle anything and reeks of censorship and mob rule by a few that hit the flag button every time a story disturbs their world view.
The mans family said he had PTSD and Anxiety. The gun he killed himself with was his own gun. Considering those factors and occam's razor it feels disrespectful to have this sort of speculative conversation. If this were his wife, kids, mother I would be inclined to say news worthy, but random friend as the only person who heard this story feels a whole lot like someone looking for their own 15 minutes of fame.
Note: I did not flag it and have a comment on one of the other threads...
I do, I didn't, but I understand why it happens. my HN account is 14 years old, I read comments frequently, comment rarely, upvote occasionally, and flag very very rarely.
I don't downvote because can't, I don't have enough karma yet. so, even if people who can't yet downvote don't know the full effects of flagging it's _literally_ their only option to indicate their belief something doesn't belong on the front page.
I flagged this one because I'm not sure what kind of meaningful discussion we're supposed to have about it, nor do I currently see one occurring here. It is not even remotely on-topic for this site:
Rank speculation about newsworthy deaths never go well on HN and historically have caused more pain for family and friends, and contributed to large amounts of misinformation being spread. I'm speaking specifically of Bob Lee, and also Tony Hsieh.
You say "Maybe this one will stick this time" but the main posting about this received over 360 comments, which is a lot for HN. It's not like the whole thing has just been nuked with no chance for productive discussion. But I'm not seeing much productive discussion. I don't mind these being de-ranked for now.
If it turns out to be an eBay stalking scandal type story, then we'll have a lot to talk about.
If it turns out that even being a successful whistleblowing can lead to life experience so awful that you want to kill yourself halfway through the depositions, then maybe we can talk about what can we as a society can provide whistleblowers to help them navigate these incredibly difficult times (financially, emotionally, socially, and spiritually).
The reason we're talking about this is because the Emmy award-winning network executive/producer/writer/reporter Anne Emerson made it her biggest story on ABC4 today[0]. The YouTube video has almost a million views, which is a lot more than these HN threads will have. It's the top post on r/interestingasfuck today[1], tied for 2nd most popular this week. It's referenced in the top post of r/wallstreetbets today[2] (bullet point #2).
I inserted nuanced opinion to help steer discussion away from emotional knee-jerk responses with no substance, to something a bit more productive. I haven't seen a lot of that in these threads, so I'm happy they're getting de-ranked. I don't think it's fair to characterize me the way you are.
Just an FYI, there are some guidelines and a FAQ linked at the bottom of this page. A useful one:
> Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put *asterisks* around it and it will get italicized.
In other words, don't SHOUT EVERYTHING. Just like when speaking with people in person, shouting is generally a rude thing to do. If you want to emphasize something, just use asterisks around it: *emphasize* becomes emphasize (double up the *'s like ** or use \* if you want to include an asterisk literally).
A single Boeing subsidiary - under 300m revenue - had a Social Media budget of 7m/year. That's two percent of revenue. Now imagine what capital-B-Boeing's social media budget is, and think about what a primitive -if awesome! - platform YN is. Something to keep in mind.
33 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 85.8 ms ] threadSeveral previous submissions and two previous discussions on this same topic (one with 14 comments and one with 70 comments). All in the last few hours.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39712618 - another with 351 comments from about 11 hours ago
I vouched it, because it's a worthy discussion to have, and it should stay up so people can see it.
The other two were knocked off the top 20+ pages within a few minutes, you'd only notice it if you got lucky.
@dang, can we have an intervention here? Maybe merge the two other dupes together and allow the discussion to be had? People clearly want to talk about it.
But who would do something like that and have the resources to do that? (<-- that applies to TFA and the meta situation)
I found this info interesting in a Reddit aviation thread. It helps with the tinfoil hat feelings.
>He was not testifying against Boeing for anything to do with their planes. He already did that and has been public about it since 2019. This deposition was for the appeal for his own civil defamation case against Boeing, which he orginially lost. So Boeing was not threatened by his testimony in anyway. Even if they lost the case or settled, it would be a drop in the bucket compared to the harm he has already caused them and other legal issues they are already having...
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12173836
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Okay then it should be flagged by your reasoning, did you read the article? Because there's no proof in it that he ever said it. A woman who refused to identify herself past a first name claims he said it.
Comments can be upvoted, downvoted, or flagged. There, voting may be used to express agreement and disagreement, but flagging should only be used for comments that violate the site's guidelines.
The mans family said he had PTSD and Anxiety. The gun he killed himself with was his own gun. Considering those factors and occam's razor it feels disrespectful to have this sort of speculative conversation. If this were his wife, kids, mother I would be inclined to say news worthy, but random friend as the only person who heard this story feels a whole lot like someone looking for their own 15 minutes of fame.
Note: I did not flag it and have a comment on one of the other threads...
This is not evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. This is rank hearsay, and it doesn't belong here.
I do, I didn't, but I understand why it happens. my HN account is 14 years old, I read comments frequently, comment rarely, upvote occasionally, and flag very very rarely.
I don't downvote because can't, I don't have enough karma yet. so, even if people who can't yet downvote don't know the full effects of flagging it's _literally_ their only option to indicate their belief something doesn't belong on the front page.
there's an implicit analogue between comments and submissions. i suspect low karma users use the only tools at their disposal for both
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You say "Maybe this one will stick this time" but the main posting about this received over 360 comments, which is a lot for HN. It's not like the whole thing has just been nuked with no chance for productive discussion. But I'm not seeing much productive discussion. I don't mind these being de-ranked for now.
If it turns out to be an eBay stalking scandal type story, then we'll have a lot to talk about.
If it turns out that even being a successful whistleblowing can lead to life experience so awful that you want to kill yourself halfway through the depositions, then maybe we can talk about what can we as a society can provide whistleblowers to help them navigate these incredibly difficult times (financially, emotionally, socially, and spiritually).
While you can find many much much older articles that are far more dead just a couple pages back.
You wouldn't get the news at all about this tidbit of information if you didn't check HN in the right few minutes.
I for one get a lot of my news from HN, as it's a news aggregator and a lot of other mediums are more censored.
People are clearly interested in talking about it and have opinions about it and find it newsworthy given the TIMING and possible MOTIVE.
YOU even had an OPINION you inserted in, but you don't feel others should be able to see this or put their POV or COUNTERPOINTS in?
I inserted nuanced opinion to help steer discussion away from emotional knee-jerk responses with no substance, to something a bit more productive. I haven't seen a lot of that in these threads, so I'm happy they're getting de-ranked. I don't think it's fair to characterize me the way you are.
0: https://abcnews4.com/news/local/if-anything-happens-its-not-...
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/top/?t=day
2: https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/top/?t=day
> Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put *asterisks* around it and it will get italicized.
In other words, don't SHOUT EVERYTHING. Just like when speaking with people in person, shouting is generally a rude thing to do. If you want to emphasize something, just use asterisks around it: *emphasize* becomes emphasize (double up the *'s like ** or use \* if you want to include an asterisk literally).
People saw it. People talked about it. And are still.
Direct to the discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39712618
If you didn't see it within the 20 minutes it was there, you would never find it unless you had that handy direct link of yours.
And this one is currently flagged. It was flagged when I vouched for it (that's how I was able to vouch for it)