It seems relevant to this article, and its portrayal of librarians as dangerous, that the national Institute for Museum and Library Services was recently essentially destroyed by Presidential executive order and DOGE, probably illegally, its grants largely or entirely revoked, and its employees laid off.
Are there any structural or systematic changes that should be made to how the site works right now, so that remedies such as this do not need to be hand performed one-offs?
I think you are describing a different, hypothetical problem?
The current problem is that news that are critic of the current administration are suppressed. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43462783 (U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat) was off the front page for like ~24 hours?
You are describing the problem that there are too many actual politic related news on the front page. That is not a problem right now.
That's an inaccurate perception. HN has had a high number of political threads on the front page in recent months, and most (nearly all, in fact) have been critical of the current administration.
If you find that hard to believe, see these lists:
They are a couple months old now, but the point hasn't changed: the most-discussed (by far!) topic on Hacker News gets perceived as totally-suppressed-and-silenced by the passionate portion [1] of the audience that wants more of this material. I call this the "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded" theory of HN threads. [2]
This is not a new phenomenon [3]. Here's an example of the same thing from 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23624962. That was me responding to someone complaining that the most-discussed-by-far topic on HN was being "aggressively removed from discussion".
Meanwhile, the audience that wants less of this material perceives the site as being completely-overrun-by-politics. To these we have to give the inverse of the current explanation. You can see from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 how far back that goes.
Both of these perceptions are wrong. Both are consequences of the fundamentals I listed in the GP comment. And both are special cases of a more general phenomenon: for anyone passionate about topic X, the HN front page never contains enough X.
The most passionate users rarely express their preference as "I would prefer more X on HN". Rather they say: "It's unbelievable how X is completely and utterly suppressed and censored on HN".
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... I use 'passionate' or 'passion' a lot to describe these segments of the audience (on any topic and/or side). This is not intended disrespectfully. People have legitimate reasons for feeling passionately, and often the topics are far more important than most stories on HN. However, mitigating the power of these passions to shape HN is critical to keeping this the kind of site that it's supposed to be. If we didn't do this, HN would turn into a current affairs site overnight.
FYI a tungsten carbide ring, although it cannot realistically be cut off your finger, is brittle, and can easily and safely be snapped with a pair of locking pliers (locking to avoid clamping down on your finger). You may be thinking of titanium rings which are not removable in this fashion and thus are less safe.
Ada Lovelace wrote what is often considered the first computer program, a set of instructions for the (unbuilt) Analytical Engine to calculate Bernoulli Numbers.
Appropriately, if this is the first computer program, it also contains the first bug! It's impossible to say whether this was a typesetting error or Lovelace's original, but the transcription of her instructions accidentally transpose a "v4" and "v5".
People like to get pedantic about whether or not Ada's program was "the first program" or not, but it's fair to say that it was at least the first nontrivial program, and that she was the first to recognize both what calculating machines would eventually be capable of (e.g. manipulating text by assigning letters and symbols to numbers) and the inherent difficulty of transforming state in such complex ways (writing complex programs would not be a simple task).
> It’s the intricacies of her program, though, that make it so remarkable. Whether or not she ought to be known as “the first programmer,” her program was specified with a degree of rigor that far surpassed anything that came before. She thought carefully about how operations could be organized into groups that could be repeated, thereby inventing the loop. She realized how important it was to track the state of variables as they changed, introducing a notation to illustrate those changes. As a programmer myself, I’m startled to see how much of what Lovelace was doing resembles the experience of writing software today.
> ...
> One Wikipedia article calls Lovelace the first to publish a “complex program.” Maybe that’s the right way to think about Lovelace’ accomplishment. Menabrea published “diagrams of development” in his paper a year before Lovelace published her translation. Babbage also wrote more than twenty programs that he never published. So it’s not quite accurate to say that Lovelace wrote or published the first program, though there’s always room to quibble about what exactly constitutes a “program.” Even so, Lovelace’s program was miles ahead of anything else that had been published before. The longest program that Menabrea presented was 11 operations long and contained no loops or branches; Lovelace’s program contains 25 operations and a nested loop (and thus branching). Menabrea wrote the following toward the end of his paper:
>> When once the engine shall have been constructed, the difficulty will be reduced to the making of the cards; but as these are merely the translation of algebraic formulae, it will, by means of some simple notation, be easy to consign the execution of them to a workman.20
> Neither Babbage nor Menabrea were especially interested in applying the Analytical Engine to problems beyond the immediate mathematical challenges that first drove Babbage to construct calculating machines. Lovelace saw that the Analytical Engine was capable of much more than Babbage or Menabrea could imagine. Lovelace also grasped that “the making of the cards” would not be a mere afterthought and that it could be done well or done poorly. This is hard to appreciate without understanding her program from Note G and seeing for oneself the care she put into designing it. But having done that, you might agree that Lovelace, even if she was not the very first programmer, was the first programmer to deserve the title.
Ken Libbrecht was my undergraduate advisor and I worked in his lab for a couple summers (in fact, growing snowflakes in a tank and measuring their growth rate at different temperatures and humidities - although mine had to be boring perfect hexagons to get accurate measurements).
He's a great guy and a very talented communicator. I would absolutely recommend his book, and his website, http://snowcrystals.com/ , for anyone wanting to see great photos and learn about the science behind them.
In my day (ca. 2000) there was no "forced to give an F" and in fact it was very common for exam-takers to draw a line, write "everything below this line I did after the time limit", and get partial credit for it.
Not that I recall. I don't think it's quite fair to do that, as it then becomes an infinite time exam.
But also consider that the midterm and the final were the entire grade. No credit was given for homework, showing up for class, etc. The rules about the exams were pretty clear.
However, if you had a borderline exam grade, but had done the homework diligently, the prof would use that as a tie breaker.
His fellow students thought the F was a bit harsh, but he conceded that it was fair and took his lumps with equanimity. I quite admired him for it. In the end, it didn't hurt him because he graduated and went on to a very successful career.
See, e.g., https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/04/11/trum...
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/l...
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