I know Rust might be a better technology for some drivers and use cases, but if they are constantly fighting an upstream battle with merging it, why not bite the bullet and write it in C?
At that point the hard work of reverse engineering and coming up with a spec and a reliable piece of software that implements that spec are done. Don’t let that work go to waste.
Are they doing things the way they're doing it just to get it done, or are they doing it because they feel it's the right way to do things and they want to get it done right?
If the former, then fair question. If the latter, then you answered your own question at the start of that sentence.
> Don’t let that work go to waste.
Which is what would happen if they gave up and wrote it in C if they're goal is not just to get it done, but to get it done right.
Doesn't mean there aren't better/alternative ways to do things. Doesn't mean it's not worth asking if a lang other than rust may be better for certain/all parts of this (And yes, that includes C). But it also doesn't mean their hard work is going to waste just because the work is hard.
> Hi! It looks like you might have come from Hacker News.
> Asahi Linux developers are frequent targets of abuse on Hacker News. Despite our pleas, the moderators have not taken effective action to improve the situation.
> Overtly hateful content is often flagged on HN and not immediately visible. Unfortunately, when a comment is flagged and killed, its child subthread is not. That preserves the 'clean' image of the website, but the reduced moderation activity enables abuse to continue. Although you don't see those threads, search engines do. HN uniquely has a high page rank and low moderation, making it a prime target for bad actors to poison search results with abuse, bigotry, and nastiness. This isn't low-level trolling, but an organized attempt to destroy lives, including of developers in our communities.
My question exactly. It's bold and long enough to sound serious, but dances around vagaries. I have never targeted an Asahi Linux Developer. I've never seen anything that looked like that either. I can't even vet the claim, because no examples are given. I wouldn't know what to demand, or who to demand it of.
I think the contents of the warning explain the warning on the top adequately. There are some links in there as well, and they in turn lead to examples and citations.
Considering the amount of visitors on HN, it's possible you've never seen or met anyone matching the described behaviour (in the linked pages). But the people on the receiving end might not want to warn for the thousands of people it doesn't apply to, but rather the ones where it does.
Say it's only 10% of 1000 visitors matching the HN referrer, that's still 100 people against a handful of volunteers. If only 10 of those think it's funny to SWAT them, or send them things they didn't order, all day, every day, that's enough to warrant such a warning.
I don't think that's the clue here. The clue is calling out such behaviour.
Maybe that's already something that people do, and the banner does nothing. Or maybe it's not something people do, and maybe some people start doing it, and then the banner does something.
The article doesn't, but it provides the context on why the warning does, which is why it is there.
That should answer your question: "What’s with the warning on the top?"
Perhaps you expected a list of all sorts of interactions between this website and that website, but I doubt the project volunteers kept a ledger to share that with you and that in itself would incite reverse brigading which solves nothing.
The project has apparently been harassed by some other group I’ve never heard of until today. I still fail to see how that has anything at all to do with HN. The wording of the warning definitely implies they’ve been hurt by HN.
That's because they have been hurt by HN. Not intentionally by HN itself, but they are also not the only target.
As for how you haven't heard of them before, that is a bit surprising. They have been mentioned here plenty of times.
HN being user-driven means they are an amplification and legitimisation vector for anyone who figures out how to abuse it. It's not an easy problem to solve, and I don't think any organisation (commercial, or otherwise) has really found a way to deal with this.
As a human side-effect, most people will either have to have experienced it themselves, or have this as part of their job to understand the issue at all, and will either deny it or assume it's exaggerated. Even those that are on the instigating side will not have a concept of the impact until it inevitably happens to them (as is common in that ecosystem).
Because a right wing forum is actively drive hate against Asahi folks (specifically Marcan), and it's using orphaned/unmoderated threads (because the anchor post is flagged) on HN to post that hate and get search ranking for it. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35237006
HN should stop making those threads available, not because right wing, or left wing, or whatever political argument you'd like to make, but because it's a way to get search juice for lots of things for free that is also detrimental, ultimately, to HN.
You can post any garbage you like outside the view of the community, and still get it associated with the community here.
Just read KF's post about Hector and while it is frivolous (a lot of "who cares" moments), it is also founded with plenty of evidence. Simple freedom of speech, not hate speech.
Also, I would never have read it if it wasn't for this thread. :-)
Because that same line of questioning (Marcan being Lina) has been entertained by said right-wing forum, ergo this should be purged to avoid giving them "juice".
This specific case involves a specific group of people. I'd be equally annoyed if people on the other side of the spectrum used what amounts to a bug in HN to influence search ranking for a smear campaign.
HN makes flagged posts and subthreads invisible to its average users (you need to link to the subthread), but keeps them fully searchable. And does not moderate them. As a result, it's an easy way to deposit unreviewed content on a high-reputation website, leeching of that reputation.
It's got nothing to do with politics, and everything with the fact that when you allow a community to be publicly associated with content without letting the community see or moderate the content, you're damaging the community's reputation.
HN should fix the bug. That's all. Everybody involved in this particular drama is entirely entitled to say whatever the heck they want, just not under the cover of being pretend-part of this community.
But the only reason that makes you think that they belong to said right-wing forum is because they entertain this talking point, and their dislike of Marcan.
It sounds quite cyclical. They dislike Marcan because they're alt-right users leeching off this community's reputation, which is obvious because they dislike Marcan.
The people on the link you sent, they, uh, have a long comment history. No one is being "pretend-part" of the community here. Or am I missing some context?
Because HN has a reputation and this influences that reputation. The same way an open relay would harm your MTA reputation or an open redirect harms your domain reputation.
So if HN were to think: "gee, we don't want to delete this content, but we also see how it breaks the rules", they could opt to put some noindex flags for the robots to consume which is a very cheap way to try to do something that reflects their own rules.
It is of course possible that this is no reputation effect at all, and there is also no interest on a human level in all of this. In such a case, nothing happens.
It seems to be smearing HN’s reputation. They don’t even point out any examples of this supposed behavior. They just link to something entirely unrelated.
To me it seems to perfectly outline HN's reputation when moderation is delayed. This brigading has been happening on multiple projects for years, specifically by the actors mentioned in the link, but plenty of others as well.
If anything, this specific behaviour and these actors have been outlined by articles dedicated to just that, right here on this sited. Granted, other sites are often lumped in here as well, such as reddit and even stackoverflow. This is not new behaviour, it happens in all communities. The big differences between them all is to what degree they get abused and in what manner.
As for examples: I doubt people who are targeted will want to share their experience with anyone directly. Someone asking for it to stop should be enough.
I think it's reasonable to ask, but unreasonable and unrealistic to expect someone to come tell their story just for you. Even if you (and others) have never seen this before.
What you could do is plug "Asahi Linux targeted" in to any search engine and read as much as you like. It's not like this is very new either, this mess has been going on for years now.
As usual, it's also your average internet mud-flinging contest, but at the core the issue of harassment stands, and shining a light on it regardless of the actors is always a good idea.
> unreasonable and unrealistic to expect someone to come tell their story just for you
They are explicitly* asking us to take action--the onus is on them to explain to us why we should take action. They have not, so no action will happen. It's as simple as that. We aren't the ones asking for something to be done here.
Kiwi Farms is a terrible website that does terrible things. What does that have to do with us? Barring any explanation from them, my conclusion is that it doesn't have anything to do with us.
It is entirely reasonable that a site which displays different content to what was shown at time of submission, purposefully because of HN, gets flagged.
It doesn't. It has shown this banner for years, for anyone with a HackerNews referrer.
As for the flagging, the guidelines say otherwise. A change in leadership and governance of a prominent open source project is noteworthy to the point that discussion on HackerNews is a perfect fit.
Right here, of all places, people should be able to either understand the banner, or ignore it and get to the point of the article.
What I mean is that OP presumably submitted a link to this blog post because s/he intended to share the blog post. Without their knowledge, it became about the warning at the top of the page which wasn't there when they submitted. What OP submitted was not what we saw.
Re: the text up top, HN is already pretty much a mono-culture. If you dissent your comments are voted down. I'm sure its possible to have more moderation and to more actively tamp down alternative views but imo it's already excessive and reducing the scope of ideas here.
Do you have any examples where that is the case, rather than obvious rule breaking? I have seen some "voted down because people don't like it" but not "hidden because people don't like it". Voting does not equal moderation activity, it's just end-user voting which doesn't really represent the website's rules.
As for why the text up top would still apply: the moderation methods don't prevent brigading or SEO poisoning, so even if HN was perfectly moderately moderated to moderate modernity, it wouldn't help since all scrapers (including search engines and LLM companies) will still connect this content together.
I've seen plenty of [dead] political comments and then some people complain that HN has a very biased definition of what is and is not political. Ultimately I don't think there's anything to do about this; there will always be people who don't like the rules.
