This post went from mid 20s on the front page to 37 on 2nd page in a matter of less than 5 minutes. What would cause that? Total points didn't go down. It isn't flagged.
“Of these four interventions (deleting, killing, burying, and downweighting), the only one that moderators do frequently is downweighting. We downweight posts in response to things that go against the site guidelines, such as when a submission is unsubstantive, baity or sensational. Typically such posts remain on the front page, just at a lower rank.”
You're paranoid. Do you have any evidence whatsoever of this? What is the "YC ethos," and why do you get to define it? This story has nothing to do with tech in any way, it's an opinion piece, and it's about Trump. Instant flag as political bait.
It probably hasn't had enough flags to be marked as "flagged", but likely it has been flagged by several users. IIRC, flags below the threshold still act as downranks, but they don't kill the post until there are enough flags.
There is clearly an ongoing manipulation going on on HN and outgunning the moderation (if moderation itself is not compromised by a MAGA insider). Many perfectly factual, relevant stories about the Trump administration are flagged to oblivion; same with comments.
There were also many factual comments and stories that cast the Biden administration in a negative light that got similarly flagged and downvoted to oblivion.
I think a lot of people don’t come here for politics and would like to filter some of the noise out.
That's exactly right. Many of us are "silent flaggers" because the second we attempt to mention this, the rabid knee-jerk reactions from those stuck in the left vs. right dichotomy will destroy one's karma.
It’s funny your comment history says otherwise. In fact you engage defensively about these posts when they support your political view. Seems like you flag content that doesn’t align with your views
To be fair though: Biden should have stepped down halfway his term and handed the reins to Harris. That would have gotten the USA used to a woman as president and it might have saved a lot of misery. But we are where we are. Whoever voted for this grifter owns it wholly. Of course they'll all pretend they never had those yardsigns in the first place.
I see from your profile that you're from The Netherlands, so understand that the news you hear about Trump is not the whole story.
I'm not convinced that Harris would've been much better. She was given essentially one job: border Czar and she failed miserably at that. Although, I guess the open borders policy that encouraged unprecedented illegal immigration was intentional. and probably part of the greater globalist agenda. She is a DEI hire, chosen only because of her gender and skin color. Biden literally said he was going to choose a woman of color to be his vice president. Bear in mind that Harris was the first major Democrat candidate to be forced out of the primary, so she was not at all chosen on merit.
Despite what you hear, Trump is a much more popular president than Biden was here and he is mostly doing what people elected him to do. He's had a few missteps for sure, for example he needs to just release the Epstein files already and please stop talking shit about annexing Greenland and Canada. He also needs to stop licking Israel's boots so much. That being said, he's doing a fantastic job with securing the border, foreign policy (he's helped to secure several peace agreements... https://www.newsweek.com/map-shows-where-donald-trump-has-he...), and so far the economy has been noticeably better than under Biden. Also, the way he handled the assassination attempt (that the media has done their best to memory hole) was incredible. He jumped up, blood dripping from his ear shouting fight, fight, fight! That picture of him with his fist raised and the secret service agents holding him back is just so powerful and iconic, just very Presidential. (https://a57.foxnews.com/static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/conte...)
He's also much more transparent than the previous administration. Biden would give extremely rare, short, scripted interviews with the press where he literally had maps of who to call on and what to reply back to their scripted questions. Even then, he would often botch the press interviews. In contrast, Trump gives frequent, lengthy, off the cuff unscripted interviews. He also, for good or for bad, posts frequently to social media with his real honest opinions and positions. People like that he has a certain air of authenticity about him. He's not the typical American politician that dances around questions and speaks only with perfect, politically correct, focus group tested language.
The news media in America is heavily biased towards the left and does everything they can to cast him in a negative light, so it is important to view everything you hear about him through that lens.
Trump isn’t a perfect president by any means, but he is a massive improvement over Biden. Biden was the worst president of my lifetime and possibly the worst president our country has ever had.
I don't think we're going to agree on that. Boring is good. The last six months should be ample evidence of that, if you think that this is great then more power to you, let's hope you won't end up regretting it.
I wish the Biden administration had been boring. Unfortunately, they pursued several very destructive and dangerous policies that we will feel the negative repercussions of for many years to come.
We’ll see what happens in 6 months as you said, but so far I don’t regret my vote.
Most of these sorts of submissions just lead to Reddit-tier shit posting and many are interested in HN _not_ becoming _yet another_ front in the political flame wars.
There isn’t some secret cabal of MAGA types censoring you.
>many are interested in HN _not_ becoming _yet another_ front in the political flame wars.
Thanks for deciding that without asking.
Stories about the Therac-25 - badly using a computer to control a radiation machine - are fine and often end on the front page. It killed 6 people.
Stories about DOGE - badly using computers, big data, AI to save "trillions" of USD - are apparently not fine. DOGE is killing tens of thousands of people, put Musk is close to Trump, so talking about it is "political" and therefore there is no interest in showing on the front page that DOGE's claims are wrong by several orders of magnitude.
Stories about Theranos - badly using computers to automate lab diagnostics - used to be fine. We talked at length about how Elizabeth Holmes was hailed as a genius, then how fishy it seemed, then the whistleblowers came and blew the lid off the deception that was going on. Holmes was condemned and sent to detention.
Will we be forbidden to talk about Theranos once she gets her pardon from Trump[0]? Because it would be "political"?
Are we forbidden to talk about Trevor Milton - co-founder and CEO of bankrupt electric truckmaker Nikola Motors, pardoned in March - was a fraudster[1], when he will inevitably launch a new startup? Will any mention of it be flagged because "we don't want no political flame wars"?
That’s exactly it. People are tired of every forum on the internet being turned into a soap box for whatever political cause-du-jour is in vogue that week. People are equally tired of the melodrama that comes with it (“are we forbidden to talk about xyz politically charged topics that have repeated ad nausuem for a decade”).
Talk about it all you want. Don’t be surprised when people start rolling their eyes at you like we roll our eyes at the weird uncle who always ruins family gatherings by bringing up politics at the dinner table.
I think the issue is both-sides-ism here. This article is about the Fed illegally losing it's political independence, something that could trigger terrible inflation and a recession. That's quite a bit different than Biden falling off his bicycle. I would like to humbly suggest that the US slip-sliding into fascism is something hackers should be concerned about, worthy of discussion and debate. Pushing it down the memory hole seems unworthy of this site.
This is the same tired melodramatic trope that’s played out every time anyone even remotely to the right wins an election in the United States.
It should be no surprise that many people, myself included, aren’t interested in “discussion and debate” that amounts to “anyone who is disagrees with me is cartoonishly evil”.
But you don't live in areas where masked armed people disappear people in vans while shouting "ICE", so I guess you don't notice - and as you blank out any discussion of it as "political", as long as it doesn't happen to you personally, you will keep refusing to admit anything is happening.
You can try to normalize this as much as you want, it ain't gonna normalize. Ignoring the supreme court? Ignoring habius corpus and due process? Pissing on the constitution, when you swore an oath to defend it? WTF.
One of Trump's primary objectives is destruction of the Fed, which is what gives the US Dollar status as the world reserve currency. His objective is directly aligned with Putin's, which should come as no surprise. They both realize that the very source of the US's power is the Federal Reserve. Don't take his actions as misguided - they are malevolent and intentional, without a doubt.
Agreed. Again I ask: How different are his actions from the actions of someone trying for the complete destruction of the United States of America as a world power?
This is a problem. I keep asking myself: "If I wanted to destroy the USA could I do worse?" and then I find the answer is no. And then they do find ways to make it worse, sometimes much worse. So I'm no longer even sure what the game plan is here, it looks like they are not only trying to destroy the USA as a world power but at the same time to set things up so that there will be far fewer inhabitants. That to me is a far more worrying thing than just the usual left-right power games. Concentration camps are a small step away from gulags. Wholesale deportation is a small step away from disappearing people. Wrecking the currency is a small step away from wrecking the economy in unrecoverable ways.
This is not something subtle, this is something large, gross and horrendous. Call me alarmist if you want but in my wildest dreams prior to Jan 6th 2025 did I think that it would get this bad this fast. Things have already fallen off a cliff or they are about to and I'm not sure I will be able to spot the difference.
Politicians want to control the Fed so they can drop interest rates and cause a short-term economic and stock market boom, followed by really bad things in the long-term.
How are markets supposed to react to that?
If markets are going to go up, and then down, do you buy or sell?
If Trump is going to take over the Fed, the smart move is to buy. If there's going to be a huge party before the world ends, you go to the party.
But the cost of borrowing will go through the roof because the market knows the bad stuff will happen. So nobody is going to buy treasuries without a significant increase in return.
Yes, the cost of borrowing for the government will go through the roof.
The Fed will drop interest rates, this will make borrowing easy, people in the economy can get easy money. Inflation will rise, which makes borrowing even easier, because any debt is just inflated away. People will want to hold assets that can't be devalued by inflation, which means people will not want to hold government bonds unless the US pays a high interest rate on those bonds, and when the US government pays a high interest rate on its bonds.
So, we would expect the stock market to increase temporarily, and people will want to buy that increase. The long-term bond market would tank because people would know nobody will want to hold US bonds. Overall it would be a very schizophrenic market.
> Even if proven, the administration’s claim — that Cook violated the law before her time in office by designating two different homes as her primary residence when applying for mortgages — probably wouldn’t meet the test.
Seriously that's the allegation? When I heard false information on a mortgage I assumed inflated income or assets or concealing the source of a downpayment. Is this even material? Can't a person have 2 homes and live in both?
One home is always the "primary residence" for legal purposes. You can have and live in as many homes as you want, but only one counts as your primary residence.
That said, the allegation is just that, an allegation. Further, it's coming from people who are highly motivated to exaggerate or lie.
You can have two homes and split your time in both but in the end if you want these kinds of finance benefits you can only claim one home as your primary and actually live there most of the time otherwise you are committing fraud. The lender's risk models and expected loan lifetimes are probably radically different if a property is going to be used as someone's primary residence versus an often-vacant vacation home versus a rental property. They'll have offered a different rate and qualification requirements if she said it was going to be a rental apartment.
It is still a pretty massive pot meet kettle argument though. Trump's a convicted fraudster. Let's remove everyone who has committed fraud from office. Can we add Ken Paxton to the list with Trump as well? Oh wait, not my guys...
I was talking with a neighbor raging about how corrupt Lisa Cook is and how these people just think they should get away with anything and how these people need to be put in prison for a long time. After pointing out Ken Paxton (someone they hope runs for Congress) claimed three houses as primary residences, well, that's different see...
I’m all for the law being applied equally to everyone no matter which political party they affiliate with. To be honest it’s ridiculous that we all just accept that politicians get to play by a different set of rules and that your side is corrupt, but it’s different when my side does it.
Trump is going to screw around trying to rig markets to advantage his positions and his desire for "line go up", and accidentally expose that they're actually already rigged and incredibly fragile (because of all the measures taken to hide that rigging).
Yup. Boomers be the death of all. So much of what's been done over the past 5 years-ish has been because a stock market crash would devastate the largest voting bloc at the worst possible moment; there would be no "just wait for the recovery." Ironically, many of those measures have made any potential crash much, much worse. Not just in terms of a general collapse, but with disproportionate impacts because of the nature of the interventions.
Don't look into what's actually in those retirement funds.
Obviously Trump wants more control over the Fed, but the backlash against this is also obviously propaganda. If she committed a felony, she shouldn't be in charge of anything. I don't think that's a controversial opinion. All of the reporting saying that the firing isn't being done in the proper manner is just hiding behind technicalities. At some point people have to accept that throwing out all laws so your side "wins" just benefits wannabe-dictators, and I don't see many of those on the left.
Having studied history a bit more than most people, I have a gut reaction to the kind of "lawlessness escalation vortex" where lawlessness by one group is used to excuse lawlessness of an opposing group. I've seen how this ends in history, and it's not good. Essentially, the strongest side wins, takes all of the power, and becomes totalitarian, because who wants to re-institute laws once you're king? Oh, it might be Trump. Or it might be some Bernie Sanders bro. Does it matter in the end, if the laws are gone and we all live as loyal subjects of the crown? But sure, downvote me, shoot the messenger. This is a lesson, I fear, we must learn at the point of the despot's guards spears every 200 or so years, so perhaps there's no avoiding it. But someday, you'll say "damn you phendrenad2, why couldn't you be more convincing, you tried to warn me but not hard enough!"
> If she committed a felony, she shouldn't be in charge of anything. I don't think that's a controversial opinion.
When Al Franken resigns because of allegations of sexual misconduct, it proves Democrats are evil. When Donald Trump is convicted of dozens of felonies, it proves Republicans are victims of politically motivated witch hunts. It shouldn't be a controversial opinion that being a felon should disqualify you from public service, but because of that very opinion, labeling someone as a felon as been weaponized to the point where the label can be dismissed by supporters
In my country, she would be put on leave, then investigated, then tried, then let go, then hidden away if the felony was big or forgotten if it was minor (because white collar crime almost always pays, it's better to go hard).
It is not proven. Trump is merely alleging - it is a manufactured allegation.
> If she committed a felony, she shouldn't be in charge of anything
Apply the same logic to the 34 count felon in the office of the President. Until you apply the harshest standard to the President, none of your other complaints hold any value.
If the allegation turns out to be true, which seems to be incredibly likely now, will you learn from this? Or will you continue to believe the news outlets that led you to this mistaken belief?
Big if, especially since she hasn't been formally charged with anything. In any case, even if she has, Trump and Pulte's authority to fire her is questionable. It would be like a mayor attempting to fire a private security guard that's contracted with the city, pending an investigation.
A couple of points: if it were a LEO, they would generally be put on leave, not fired. But, again, officer of a private entity (which the Fed) is; the mayor/president's ability to influence that entity's activity ends at the contracts/relevant statutes's stipulations - and if there's a dispute, it gets hashed out in civil court. Of course, if a felony has been committed, one could just wait for the conviction, which would likely lead to termination by one of several exigencies.
> Trump and Pulte's authority to fire her is questionable
So you agree that if she did it, she should be fired, but not by Trump. But the effect is the same. Seems like you're making a mountain out of a molehill.
And by the way, if she did it, and whomever is (in your eyes) responsible for firing her chooses not to, would you consider that a direliction of duty, I.E. would that person deserve to be fired? And would it eventually get to the president's responsibility to fire someone if people kept deciding no to, all theh way up the chain? I'm really curious to know what your thoughts are on this, if any.
What are the chances that suddenly half the people in power that Trump wants to get rid of have committed a felony? And what are the chances that the people that Trump has put into power have committed the same felonies (or much worse) and are getting a pass? If that doesn't worry you then you have to stop statements like 'having studied history more than most' or something to that effect and realize that you are in uncharted territory. You are still applying normal standards to a blatant power grab and slide into a form of government that does not have a happy ending.
Go feed some basic undergraduate economics/finance/accounting homework question into whatever cutting edge LLM you have access to and look at the results.
