Actually, this was a case of HN being ahead of the curve. I re-upped micahflee's original post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43875476 as soon as I saw it yesterday, and it spent 18 hours on the front page.
At 6pm yesterday this update came out, which seems to have gotten more public attention, but HN had already been discussing the original in-depth article for quite a while by then. What to do?
The story itself is on-topic. The question is whether the update (the current submission) should be counted as a follow-up [1] to the earlier thread, or whether it should be counted as significant new information (SNI) [2], and thus have its own thread.
On HN two articles count as the same story if they would lead to substantially the same discussion. That's pretty clearly the case with 43875476 (the original thread) and 43890179 (this update). In such cases we merge the threads, as tomhow mentioned, so as not to have a split discussion.
But it's clear that there's community demand to discuss this story today. Since "well actually we were ahead of the curve" is no way to speak to a hungry beast, we're going to re-up the original thread, so discussion of the story can continue on the frontpage, and pin a link to the update article to the top of that one (tomhow already did this), so people can read both.
Hacker news is about tech news. Political hacks are absolutely included within that. Personally I’d love to read HN users knowledgable thoughts on the topic, the community here is very well qualified to make points others won’t.
it is a bit troubling to me how this and stories covering the same group of people are so often quickly flagged.
i saw this story on other sites and immediately thought: hacker news will be the best place to follow along with this only to see it flagged dead. it does seem like this seems to be happening quite a lot when a certain group of people and their competence levels are being covered.
> i saw this story on other sites and immediately thought: hacker news will be the best place to follow along with this
By the time the story hit other sites, HN had already been discussing it for quite a while (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43875476), and that thread had gone through the usual life cycle and was falling off the frontpage.
We've re-upped it now, because lots of people are having the experience you described: seeing the story on other sites and wondering why it isn't on HN.
All: the main reason for not giving this story front page exposure is that there is already an article about this app that's been on the front page all day:
And that article contains a link to the 404media.co story, reporting the hack, and other commentary about the security of the app.
And there are several mentions in that discussion thread about the 404media.co story, and I've pinned another link to the top of that thread.
If we had a separate thread it would split the discussion and we always avoid doing that; it makes more sense to keep it all in one thread, as it really is one topic.
It should also be noted the article specifically states:
“The hacker has not obtained the messages of cabinet members, Waltz, and people he spoke to . . .”, so it’s not actually a breach of administration communication that it first seems to be from the headline.
Yeah, I was shocked to see this buried. If the allegations are verified this could be a huge leak on what a number of people were led to believe is a secure by default platform. It turns out when you can’t trust the CI/CD pipe those guarantees go out the window.
Between this scandal and the previous secretary of state Hillary Cliton hosting her own private email server for official public communications... it reeks of both impunity and incompetence...
Conflating the two is certainly a choice. Also, Hillary is the previous Secretary of State in the same sense Henry Cabot Lodge is (assuming he was, already spent more time than reasonable replying to this).
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