Ask HN: How do things get flagged?
I tried to submit a link and it seemed to be immediately flagged.
There is going to be an event on X where a third party candidate will supposedly answer the debate questions in realtime. This seems relevant to HN because of the IP implications (CNN obviously doesn't want anyone taking any eyeballs off of their ads, but do they have any right to stop it?) as well as the technical challenge of pulling it off.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 53.9 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups
What's more of a hack than working around some of the most powerful institutions in the world?
EDIT: on second thought, I'd be pretty shocked if this were covered on cable news.
There aren't any in the thing you linked. There are interesting technical details in, say, delivering a twitch stream but most twitch streams are not good HN posts.
What's more of a hack than working around some of the most powerful institutions in the world?
That's the 'everything is related to everything somehow' argument but, similarly, you can make it about anything - it just tends to avoid the concrete objections to the thing.
I'm thinking of this more in the sense of the ycombinator application question:
"Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage."
This could be an example of a tactic for a startup to use against incumbents with enormous advantages, since thats basically what the situation is.
Prenouncements for events, most kinds of generic political advocacy are not great HN topics though, which is likely why your post was flagged.
The implication is that probably another user flagged your submission because they considered it off-topic. Generally anything political will immediately get flagged because people here don't like to discuss that.
Can this be done well enough that it's actually compelling for viewers? How? Do they just rebroadcast the stream and put something over it?
Is X mature enough to handle this? (DeSantis tried to do a big event a while back and it was a complete flop if I remember correctly).
So far as flagging, this is my understanding.
A small number of people need to flag something for it to appear [flagged]. It may be as little as 2 or 3 but it is certainly more than 1. Some people do watch the new queue and flag a lot, other things are likely to get flagged when they get more visibility.
I made a model which could predict the fate of HN submissions and found my model seemed to perform unreasonably well at predicting flagging (a ROC around 0.96 as compared to the 0.72 or so of my "does it get more than 1/2 a comment per vote?" model and the 0.63 of my "does it get more than 10 votes?")
Turned out it was too good to be true because HN automatically kills a lot of submissions that you never see unless you turn on showdead. Some people spam the same headline over and over again hundreds of times and if you don't design your test-train split such that the same headline can never appear on both sides you will get the wrong idea of the performance of the model. (This affected my other models too but not so catastrophically)
The #1 way people get their posts marked [dead] all the time is they keep posting links over and over from their own blog or other site but never post anything else. You can certainly do some self-promotion as a community member of HN but if you're not a participant in the community it's not welcome.
I have no problem with HN auto-flagging spam posts. It's a service to the community.
By the way, if you see something flagged that shouldn't be, you can "vouch" for it.
That said, your link doesn't really lead to a substantive article discussing anything of technical or intellectual interest, which is supposed to be the minimal bar for any political submission (although as many people ignore that as abuse flags.) It's essentially an advertisement, which unless you're a YC partner is a guaranteed flag.
But only comments can be downvoted. Posts can't. So for a post, flagging is the only option to say "this doesn't belong on HN".
That said, your topic doesn't sound like most people would consider on topic for HN. It shouldn't be flagged, but I'd expect it to be buried.