It gets [flagged] and [flagged][dead]ed very quickly. Some people flag because they don't care about politics, others flag because they're in favor of what's happening, the rest flag because all the discussions turn into flamewars and are unproductive.

I do understand wanting to avoid “politics” (however that gets defined) on HN but in this particular moment it feels like a real loss.

I’ve read articles about how DOGE might have misinterpreted data because of COBOL, just today I saw the announcement of all these “5 things” emails being plugged into AI… there are a lot of people on HN well positioned to comment knowledgably on this stuff but the threads get flagged very quickly.

Do a search for "doge" or "musk". There are plenty threads that don't get flagged.

It’s all so speculative.

I was contacted by a reporter asking about the possible security implications of the Doge stuff.

All I could think of was the false/misleading claims about DNS traffic on Trumps server back in 2016.

I said something like, “if the humans in charge grant access to another human, a secure system would grant the new human access.”

They didn’t use my quote.

> It’s all so speculative.

Yes and no. DOGE already set up a site that gave the public write access. There are stories to be told already.

Sorry I don’t know about this. How can you know what permissions a web app has?

I’m a little flustered by all this talk of “read-access” and “write-access” in reference to DOGE.

Reading and writing what?

If these transactions systems are well designed, everything is written. They should be using special “write-once, read-many” media ensure everything is immutably recorded.

Even if it’s just a conventional SQL database and not some kind of transaction ledger, you can recreate the state of the DB by rerunning all SQL commands, which should be recorded.

What does “write” mean exactly here?

> Sorry I don’t know about this. How can you know what permissions a web app has?

https://www.404media.co/anyone-can-push-updates-to-the-doge-...

The cobol thing was just some random guys tweet, that had a wrong premise to start with as the first of all dates were stored as strings not dates, and then later proven further wrong when they released the number of each person in each age bracket. These things are too politicized to get much value, hell people even think Elon waving to the crowd was a nazi salute. In all its all speculation except for the details posted on doge.gov anyways. Unfortunately since Elon's trump endorsement people are mostly just one side picking their favorite or picking on their least favorite.

> hell people even think Elon waving to the crowd was a nazi salute.

Because it was. To describe what he did as a “wave” is simply not plausible.

Also HN is not that efficient at flamewars. When a new iphone generates 2k comments, you have to logout to visit (enables cache/cdn/?), cause it stops responding otherwise. Now imagine 10 politics threads on the frontpage with thousands of flamers piling in. HN simply can’t do that. It’s a niche lisp server for discussing this week’s ai-generated ts frameworks. Politics go reddit.

dang rewrote things so it's more efficient now. They don't have to paginate large threads anymore and performance remains good.

It used to be that a single thread with ~200 comments could slow down the server, on the front page there are 3 discussions I saw (quick scan) at or over 200 and one over 600.

Oh, good to know!

>Politics go reddit.

Aka completely undiscussable woth any sense of nuance, which ironically enough is a great way to bury a lede.

But on the technical side... Man, reddit cannot handle more than 500 comments, old or new. Open thst pagination and you get repeats, orphaned replies, and a disgusting amount of lag for what should ideally just be static text.

While I don't flag them, I also don't typically vouch/upvote them. I just comment for however long they might last, with the idea that a certain amount of off-topic-ness is inevitable and a kind of safety-valve.

As much as I like a good politics/law discussion, for this "DOGE stuff" on HN I try to limit my support to items which are either:

1. News about technical details

2. Discuss information-security policies and principles

3. Contain a significant niche educational component, like how Impoundment has been historically used and how Nixon's abuses of it led to the Impoundment Act of 1974.

Fourth option: the articles are basically flamebait, as this one happens to be. Nothing of substance has occurred here; a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order for a couple of weeks until the case can move forward.

I don't know. Is it really not important that a single guy, the richest in the world and heavily dependend on government subsides, able to access personal data of every single government employee ? (And send them pretty childish emails over the weekend !)

Given the fact that people with very questionable backgrounds "work" on this data, it all looks like a massive potential for data leaks. It happens in plain sight, and apparently not many people object. Or more accurately, as on this website, they are silenced.

The argument about politics here is that it is more important than most tech discussions, so could easily crowd out the tech and 'interesting' (but perhaps kind of obscure) articles.

For instance a discussion about Ukraine... what happens there is life-or-death for thousands of people.

It's tough to look away from it right now though. At nearly 50, I still think tech is fun and interesting, but I'm getting to an age where I want to leave a better world for my kids and it looks like what they'll actually get is perhaps much worse than what I grew up with.

Not thousands of people. Millions of people. At least.

In theory, yes. In practice I rarely see more than one topic on the front page a day. It's still about popularity among the audience, and of course HN's own algorithms (and dang) tend to do a good job of avoiding multiple like-minded topics being scattered out like Reddit does.

There is a huge amount of relentless work from 'dang' and others moderating the site. That's a big reason you don't see that stuff.

I don't know, but this temporary restraining order doesn't tell you anything new about the question.

Except it does. A TRO means the judge believes it likely that your case has merit and will win and that there is irreparable public harm without a TRO.

It's the opinion of a single judge, before a trial has occurred. It has some meaning, but just last week a different judge said the opposite in a related case (as the article notes), so clearly, opinions will vary.

Must we have blaring headlines and political flamefests every time a judge issues an intermediate ruling related to DOGE?

Yes. Because of the second part of what is required for a TRO. Irreparable public harm.

It should be news worthy

"Irreparable harm"...IF AND ONLY IF the case is decided in favor of the plaintiffs, and there is determined to be harm from the behavior. Neither of which has actually occurred yet.

All the judge has done is to decree that:

a) her opinion is that the plaintiffs are "likely to" prevail, and

b) you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube, so it makes sense to pause the behavior in question while trial is pending.

You're getting worked up over theoretical outcomes. TROs happen all the time, even in cases where the eventual outcome is in favor of the defendants.

>Must we have blaring headlines and political flamefests every time a judge issues an intermediate ruling related to DOGE?

I believe that's how case ruling posts commonly work on HN (plenty of "the case may proceed" with tech company news), so I don't see why not. The whole process of law is slow so it's nigh impossible for it to flood HN.

A temporary restraining order is an extraordinary measure, never granted as a right. To grant one, the plaintiff needs to succeed on all four factors: irreparable harm, likelihood of success on the merits, balance of equities, and public interest.(Yes, I've read enough TRO-related stuff that I can recite the verbiage from memory.)

Winning a TRO essentially requires that the judge agree you're going to win your case eventually and that you can't even wait until a preliminary injunction hearing to get some relief. On the flip side, losing a TRO doesn't mean all that much.

> Nothing of substance has occurred here; a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order

A TRO is something of a substance, both literally in itself and its immediate effect, and also as an indicator on the merits since a TRO requires a finding of probability of success on the merits.

> Nothing of substance has occurred here; a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order

Maybe nothing of substance to you.

But it's certainly something of substance to US citizens. Which are, I argue, a majority of HN users given YCombinator's location.

>Nothing of substance has occurred here; a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order for a couple of weeks until the case can move forward.

Given the hesitancy a few weeks ago, I'd say this is important news to know of.

But sure, politics is popular flame war just like a topic about X vs Y or any AI news.

fwiw, I flag nearly every time because of the latter reason. Almost universal cheap, knee-jerk, low-effort comments in every thread I've seen.

> How come there isn’t much discussion of DOGE on this site?

The exact same reason any negative story about Elon, Twitter, Tesla or SpaceX disappears from the front page. They get flagged to death immediately.

It also doesn't help that Paulg is still an Elon fan.

This thread is literally on the front page and not flagged.

It's not on my front or even 2nd page

edit: its not even in my top 100 stories despite being newer with more points than many others that are. How about yours?

He's not concerned with what's going on in DC? Does he think Elon is qualified to waltz in and start slashing and burning the Federal Bureaucracy? Congress hasn't approved DOGE.

paulg is more concerned with “wokeism” than he is with the federal government being stripped for parts.

If it had any "parts," there would be seven trillion dollars' worth.

But it's actually all just taxes.

Ignoring everything the taxes pay for. The parts being the Federal Bureaucracy and all the services it provides.

Maybe what is happening benefits him so he is quietly cheering on. If he stays quiet and makes no mentions of current events I will continue to assume so. I feel that if this ultimately escalates a few more rungs everybody will have to lose.

> Congress hasn't approved DOGE.

In 2014, under Obama, the United States Digital Service was established with by Congressional appropriations with the mission to "deliver better government services to the American people through technology and design" and in 2025 it was renamed to DOGE.

Have you considered that it might have been renamed DOGE for the same reason that Tesla car models spell out the word SEXY? The mission has not changed very substantively. The order directs them to modernize federal technology and software to maximize efficiency and productivity.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Digital_Service

[2]: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2025-01-29/pdf/2025-0...

This is a lame nerd snipe bordering on parody. Take a hike.

Management here are aligned with the VC startup scam that Elon represents and so they don’t want any bad press discussed related to him, and so all relevant discussion is flagged.

I've seen flagged threads, but I've also seen plenty of popular discussions where the discussion is overwhelmingly against the neofascists.

This is a blatant lie. HN does the opposite: threads critical of YC are more lightly moderated and the flags are removed a lot of the time. Flags come from users, not the mods.

Out of curiosity, how do you square that understanding with the 40 threads listed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43168527?

The posts tend to get quickly flagged and thus buried. Search the archives for relevant names and keywords, and you’ll see lots of relevant yet flagged posts. Even discussions about this fact tend to get flagged.

> How come there isn’t much discussion of DOGE on this site?

hopefully saving @dang a job.

this meta comment provide some links to other comments from dang about Major Ongoing Topics (MOTs), what happens with flagging, why some groups feel there isn't enough discussion, others feel there's too much discussion, and how moderation works for MOTs (substantively new information is often key).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43142645

If you use https://news.ycombinator.com/active, [flagged] and [dead] threads are shown, so long as there is engagement. I wish that @dang would make this the HN front page in these harrowing and hectic times. It is currently too easy for important threads to be smothered.

There's ten or so submissions per day that hit the front page and then instantly get flagged off.

It shows up in news.ycombinator.com/active if you want to go looking for it.

Search below for “doge” and limit to this week. There are thirty stories with more than ten upvotes, and 8 with over 100. That’s a major story more than once a day, and doesn’t include every Trump related disaster that was covered.

too many stans

For the last month if you want to learn anything from this site you go to "new" and only read the flagged threads.

I use http://hckrnews.com which is a nice timeline view of what's happening, isn't gamed by algorithms.

It also nicely shows that the site has had massive chasms of popular but killed posts, which you can them go read (but no longer contribute to).

Ironic that so many of the right used to clambor fo "free speech" & make claims of censorship, but many are likely here suppressing things they don't like rather than just moving along. No cost to them to just skip.

It is constantly discussed, every day, in multiple threads.

It gets flagged because the comments are very repetitive. There are only so many ways to say that Elon Musk and Donald Trump are lying, and that everything they do a pretext for destroying the government. Nobody ever discusses anything in good faith, it is just rounds of "youre a shill" "stop reading the nyt" "stop reading twitter" blah blah blah...

There are plenty of fact based discussions, just that one side of this whole "debate" has given up playing a rules- and fact-based game.

So anti-fact that they are doing their best to dismantle American university and research superiority.

ok i'll bite and in good faith: how do you think DOGE is a pretext for destroying the govt?

I don't.

I can't blame YC for feeling the heat. VC has gone off the rails in the past few years, and their proudest alumni is an ex-Worldcoin CEO that wants everyone to invest in technology that's been "around the corner" for the past 8 quarters.

I'm not saying there's a directive on-high shutting down this discussion, but if the majority of users are really YC-affiliated then this entire Trump admin thing is understandably embarassing.

Out of curiosity, how do you square that understanding with the 40 threads listed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43168527? There have been many more than just those, btw.

Just read jtsummers comment. I am responding to the parent's question in context, I don't care about the numbers or who they absolve.

Out of curiosity, how do you square that understanding with the 40 threads listed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43168527?

As a data scientist, I'd have to know the context: how many threads in the same scope have been flagged to death? I realize that my observations are not a representative sample, but I would estimate for every 1 thread about the current admin that isn't killed, 2-3 are killed. It is a common observation, amd spoken about by others.

As a coda: how does that alive/dead ratio compare to other past MOTs?

It is by far the most-discussed topic on HN of recent weeks. I've included a partial list below.

It's odd how the most-discussed topic can feel like the least-discussed, but if you think about it it kind of makes sense. I call it the "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded" theory of HN threads: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

There's another variant of this phenomenon: I've been spending most of my time posting dozens of in-depth explanations of this over the same time period, and yet somehow these explanations don't make it through to many users. I assume you haven't run into any of those, since you probably wouldn't have asked your (perfectly legitimate!) question if you had. Here are a couple to get you started, if you (or anyone) want to understand what's been going on here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43130700

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011

If you (or anyone) will take a look at those, and then still have a question that isn't answered there, let me know and I'll be happy to take a crack at it.

---

It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43150085 - Feb 2025 (761 comments)

Ask HN: Do US tech firms realize the backlash growing in Europe? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43139172 - Feb 2025 (289 comments)

DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43138238 - Feb 2025 (1436 comments)

SpaceX engineers brought on at FAA after probationary employees were fired - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43127819 - Feb 2025 (133 comments)

Every .gov Domain - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43125829 - Feb 2025 (265 comments)

Treasury agrees to block DOGE's access to personal taxpayer data at IRS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43121306 - Feb 2025 (170 comments)

DOGE puts $1 spending limit on government employee credit cards - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43120231 - Feb 2025 (690 comments)

DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43112084 - Feb 2025 (1664 comments)

Doge Claimed It Saved $8B in One Contract. It Was $8M - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43101757 - Feb 2025 (125 comments)

A SpaceX team is being brought in to overhaul FAA's air traffic control system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43101009 - Feb 2025 (146 comments)

"Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies" – Executive Order - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43098705 - Feb 2025 (1278 comments)

USDA fired officials working on bird flu, now trying to rehire them - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43097709 - Feb 2025 (179 comments)

US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43066182 - Feb 2025 (788 comments)

Are DOGE's Claims of Social Security Payments to 150-Year-Olds Way Off Base? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43056993 - Feb 2025 (108 comments)

Anyone can push updates to the doge.gov website - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43045835 - Feb 2025 (1123 comments)

USAID funding freeze disrupts global tuberculosis control efforts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43038727 - Feb 2025 (119 comments)

DOGE Has Started Gutting a Key US Technology Agency - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43037426 - Feb 2025 (179 comments)

DOGE staffer is trying to reroute FEMA funds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43036042 - Feb 2025 (285 comments)

DOGE as a National Cyberattack - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43035977 - Feb 2025 (211 comments)

NOAA's public weather data powers the local forecasts on your phone and TV - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43018643 - Feb 2025 (113 comments)

Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42981756 - Feb 2025 (1801 comments)

Announcing the data.gov archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42970039 - Feb 2025 (132 comments)

Elon Musk's Demolition Crew - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42968430 - Feb 2025 (345 comments)

DOGE staffer resigns over racist posts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42966412 - Feb 2025 (105 comments)

DOGE employees ordered to stop using Slack - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42951458 - Feb 2025 (381 comments)

20k federal workers take "buyout" so far, official says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42950790 - Feb 2025 (548 comments)

What's happening inside the NIH and NSF - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42940257 - Feb 2025 (1535 comments)

Onlookers freak out as 25-year-old set loose on Treasury computer system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42936421 - Feb 2025 (133 comments)

Payments crisis of 2025: Not “read only” access anymore - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42933219 - Feb 2025 (654 comments)

Words flagged in search of current NSF awards - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42932760 - Feb 2025 (155 comments)

The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42910910 - Feb 2025 (2990 comments)

CDC: Unpublished manuscripts mentioning certain topics must be pulled or revised - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42905937 - Feb 2025 (721 comments)

CDC data are disappearing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42897696 - Feb 2025 (589 comments)

Musk aides lock government workers out of computer systems at US agency - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42892278 - Jan 2025 (125 comments)

NSF starts vetting all grants to comply with executive orders - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42886661 - Jan 2025 (488 comments)

Archivists work to save disappearing data.gov datasets - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42881367 - Jan 2025 (238 comments)

US pauses all federal aid and grants - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42851248 - Jan 2025 (485 comments)

'Never seen anything like this' – NIH meetings and travel halted abruptly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42817910 - Jan 2025 (111 comments)

NIH hit with freezes on meetings, travel, communications, and hiring - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42798960 - Jan 2025 (440 comments)

Thank you.

Thanks for explanations! I'm really curious if it looks like brigading has increased based on what your seeing in the data, or if this looks like roughly the same patterns you've seen historically.

I assumed that brigading had increased. This is mostly due to seeing things go from unflagged to flagged in the amount of time it took me to read the article. I've been a many-times-a-day reader for about 12 years now, and I hadn't really encountered that until recently. But, after reading about MOTs, those seem like a playable reason too

By 'brigading' do you mean people colluding to flag, or people flagging because they don't like the politics of a story, or something else?

I’d be curious to know about the former, I’d imagine the latter is something that happens fairly regularly. I’d imagine (and hope) it’s not really a thing… but I mean it’s not like PaulG himself hasn’t been targeted on Twitter (as he had posted himself) by groups…

All I can tell you is that we haven't seen much evidence of it. That could be because more is going on than we know about, or it could be because people are too quick to reach for this explanation.

Internet users generally are too quick to reach for sinister/nefarious explanations of phenomena that have mundane/boring reasons, so I lean more towards that interpretation, but I really don't know.

Thank you, that is understandable, and imo, unsurprising fortunately.

I would think HN to be a much smaller/niche community than say reddit or twitter in terms of users/monetisation etc, so there’s likely more efforts to manipulate content there. I have myself seen that on niche subreddits for example where bot activity is very obvious - like a 1 hour old post with more upvotes than the top post of that month. To a lesser extent it’s also visible in probably a hundred different ways on reddit (out of which I know a few, and the r/bothunters sub likely knows many more). Thanks for being a human moderator in the middle of all this!

(Replying to your latest comment.) I meant 'colluding to flag' by brigading - same as what the other commenter was interested in.

That you haven't seen much evidence of a change is actually really nice to hear and a bit surprising. Since HN has grown in popularity in recent years, I would have expected collusion to show up as a noticeable change in behavior. The motivation and potential reward for brigading seems like it would increase with HN's influence on the tech community.

Also, thanks for responding and providing your insights!

I start to see suspicious voting patterns (persistent trickle downvoting - preventing a inconvenient post to take off, to counter positive votes one by one), professional-level rhetoric, and close to 100% talking point alignment on some very specific topics.

- What’s your experience?