Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dang 3665 days ago
(Replying here as well as via email in case other users want to know.)

HN is for stories that gratify intellectual curiosity, which this one arguably doesn't. Plus we have rules against people using HN threads for job/hiring/seeing-work posts (except in monthly threads designated for that). Those are probably the reasons why users flagged your submission.

On the other hand, it's a borderline call, the discussion is reasonably good, and the Hawaii angle is novel, so we'll cut you some slack and turn off the flags.

1 comments

By the way dang, I just want to say thanks to the mods for still keeping a human hand in things.

I do understand that a site that has this volume of interaction needs automated moderation. But it's nice to see people step in and override the algos when necessary.

As a side note to people talking about AI eating the world: how could we train an AI to make these kinds of judgment calls? (This coming from me as a huge AI fan, I am really interested in possible solutions)

P.S. While I'm here, I did have to chuckle about Alan Kay's stackoverflow question about progress in CS being closed as not suitable for SO. Sometimes even human algorithms fail :)

Thanks! Btw, if people want to make sure that we see their question they should email hn@ycombinator.com. Appeals to mods from HN comments are hit-and-miss because there's no way for us to read all the comments.

We haven't looked much into AI-style algorithmic approaches for HN moderation; we will eventually. But we're also interested in figuring out how to decentralize more moderation to the community, and what software we can build to support that.

I'm delighted to confirm that Alan's questions (and better still his answers) will always be "suitable" for Hacker News. They practically define suitable! https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=alankay1