I'm reminded of the Letter on Justice and Open Debate[1] that Bari Weiss signed only a few years ago, now she's spiking stories like this one on CECOT for showing the current administration in a negative light.
I also wonder if this story will get the type of leeway to stay on HN to collect the 200+ upvotes and 300+ comments of that previous example or if it will be flagged off the front page within minutes like so many other similar stories.
EDIT: No idea how long this post actually lasted, but checking in an hour later to see this has been flagged completely off the first 10 pages of HN despite getting close to that 200 point total.
Weiss got her start screaming about how various college professors should be fired. There has never once been a moment in her career where she seriously cared about open debate.
Literally not a journalist. She went from the opinion pages to writing opinion on substack. And for "some reason" was put in charge of a news organization.
She has worked as a staff editor in newsrooms, most notably at Tablet. It’s not accurate to say her career has solely been in the opinion section.
Also, it’s not unheard of for people working on the op-ed side of the house to become editors in chief. Most notable example I can think of would be Katharine Viner at the Guardian. And in the reverse, James Bennet went from being editor in chief at the Atlantic to running the op-ed page at the NYT.
She is more or less an Israeli propaganda agent. She was hired at CBS because, after purchasing CBS from Zionist Shari Redstone, Zionist Larry Ellison and his son needed a reliable Zionist editor in chief. Weiss’ primary qualifications are her extremely pro Israeli career path.
Larry Ellison needed a woman like Weiss because he’s invested in Israel’s success. He’s both a close personal friend of Netanyahu and the number one private donor to the IDF. Netanyahu has declared US public perception of Israel as the 8th front of their war, and Ellison (with the help of Trump) is doing his part stateside.
Why we have so many powerful “Americans” exercising their power on behalf of a foreign country is the real discussion here.
Hundreds of comments and the only one speaking the truth is downvoted. Bari Weiss is unqualified and the only reason she was put into this position is to be a useful idiot for Israel.
Her upward trajectory has been facilitated mainly through pleasing select silicon valley billionaires by echoing their views back to them in her ironically named The Free Press outlet, which they also helped found.
You can't understand technology without understanding the people behind it. I always wonder about all these non-bot people who support her: is it that they're in on the grift and everyone understands that she's just there as a wink-wink-totaly-not state censor, or do they genuinely fall for her schtick? Is there something else? I never quite get it.
A once-reasonable friend of mine genuinely thinks RJK is just some dude who tries his best, and doesn't consider him a crazy anti-vaxxer. Crazy
> just some dude who tries his best, and doesn't consider him a crazy anti-vaxxer
As much as it would be comforting for all dudes who’re trying their best to pretend otherwise, the two are not mutually exclusive. (No opinion on whether RFK Jr is in the intersection—I’m not in the US and couldn’t affect his actions even if I tried.)
The timing of this might lead one to believe Paramount’s hostile takeover bid for Warner Brothers Discovery is a consideration in their editorial decisions. They and their competitor (Netflix) need regulatory approval for such a merger and the administration has already inserted itself into the deal.
I’m writing with specific guidance on what I’d like for us to do to advance the CECOT story. I know you’d all like to see this run as soon as possible; I feel the same way. But if we run the piece as is, we’d be doing our viewers a disservice.
Last month many outlets, most notably The New York Times, exposed the horrific conditions at CECOT. Our story presents more of these powerful testimonies—and putting those accounts into the public record is valuable in and of itself. But if we’re going to run another story about a topic that has by now been much-covered we need to advance it. Among the ways to do so: does anyone in the administration or anyone prominent who defended the use of the Alien Enemies Act now regret it in light of what these Venezuelans endured at CECOT? That’s a question I’d like to see asked and answered.
- At present, we do not present the administration’s argument for why it sent 252 Venezuelans to CECOT. What we have is Karoline Leavitt’s soundbite claiming they are evildoers in America (rapists, murderers, etc.). But isn’t there much more to ask in light of the torture that we are revealing? Tom Homan and Stephen Miller don’t tend to be shy. I realize we’ve emailed the DHS spox, but we need to push much harder to get these principals on the record.
- The data we present paints an incongruent picture. Of the 252 Venezuelans sent to CECOT, we say nearly half have no criminal histories. In other words, more than half do have criminal histories. We should spend a beat explaining this. We then say that only 8 of the 252 have been sentenced in America for violent offenses. But what about charged? My point is that we should include as much as we can possibly know and understand about these individuals.
- Secretary Noem’s trip to CECOT. We report that she took pictures and video there with MS-13 gang members, not TdA members, with no comment from her or her staff about what her goal on that trip was, or what she saw there, or if she had or has concerns about the treatment of detainees like the ones in our piece. I also think that the ensuing analysis from the Berkeley students is strange. The pictures are alarming; we should include them. But what does the analysis add?
- We need to do a better job of explaining the legal rationale by which the administration detained and deported these 252 Venezuelans to CECOT. It’s not as simple as Trump invoking the Alien Enemies Act and being able to deport them immediately. And that isn’t the administration’s argument. The admin has argued in court that detainees are due “judicial review”—and we should explain this, with a voice arguing that Trump is exceeding his authority under the relevant statute, and another arguing that he’s operating within the bounds of his authority. There’s a genuine debate here. If we cut down Kristi Noem analysis we’d have the time.
My general view here is that we do our viewers the best service by presenting them with the full context they need to assess the story. In other words, I believe we need to do more reporting here.
I am eager and available to help. I tracked down cell numbers for Homan and Miller and sent those along. Please let me know how I can support you.
The whole thing is poorly-conceived and obviously false but I just have to call this out-
> Of the 252 Venezuelans sent to CECOT, we say nearly half have no criminal histories. In other words, more than half do have criminal histories. We should spend a beat explaining this.
The story isn't that people found guilty of crimes went to jail, the story is that half weren't even charged with crimes! That's the whole point of the story! We should not be aiming for a balanced diet of criminals and not-criminals in our government-sponsored foreign death camps!
The fact that they exist at all is an affront to humanity, but to say "it's OK because a slim majority deserve it"- I just don't know what to say.
> We then say that only 8 of the 252 have been sentenced in America for violent offenses. But what about charged?
What about charged? What does charged with a crime have to do with anything? Why bring that up at all? Do we send people to prison because they were charged with a crime? Is Bari Weiss a newborn baby who has never heard about the presumption of innocence?
You don’t hold a story because you want to push the government harder to respond, especially when you have the executive’s official spokesperson giving a reason on the record already.
And what does she mean that we should spend a beat explaining that half do have criminal histories? She wants them to give a cookie for that? And why is being charged relevant? You don’t send someone to prison for life for being charged.
Lastly she misstates the administrations legal justification for deportation. She doesn’t appear to be an unbiased actor here.
The fact she sent that out publicly is a good indication of how prejudiced she will be with editorial content.
Here are the excuses Bari Weiss gave to bury the story.
The reporters reached out to the govt for comment. They chose not to respond. If you insist on holding off publishing until you have a comment you’ve just given the government the ability to block the story by endlessly delaying comment.
Exactly. You give people a reasonable chance to comment, but you can't let them veto your story if they decline. That would be a naive way to be fair and balanced.
I have a feeling this will get DMCA-ed off of Internet Archive in an attempt to suppress it. Here's the infohash of the archive.org torrent download for future reference, this should allow the file to be retrieved in any torrent client as long as someone in the world is seeding it still.
Even calling it "deportation" is far too charitable towards what they've done. Deportation involves sending them back to their home countries or, if that's unsafe, to another country. These people were rendered to a prison where they're meant to spend the rest of their lives, without any of the due process even a foreigner who had committed a crime would normally be accorded in the United States under our constitution.
Fascinating how this got leaked. A TV station in Canada accidentally ran the original episode version, implying that this was pulled super late and the episode was completely in the can.
> The Trump administration has repeatedly claimed that the men sent to El Salvador were overwhelmingly violent criminals; Pro Publica reported that the administration knew at least 197 of the men had not been convicted of crimes in the United States, and six had been convicted of violent offenses.
This is an interesting question because it goes to show you just how hard it is to know how or why the government is using its power to deprive people of life, liberty, or property.
I wonder if we could set up a system where the government has an opportunity to share its evidence and the public gets an opportunity to scrutinize it on a case-by-case basis so they can fully understand whether their government is acting appropriately.
does it matter? they were Venezuelans and they were sent to El Salvador. I know that some folks just lump all Latinos into one bucket but Venezuela and El Salvador are, in fact, not the same country.
Hmm maybe walk us through this. If they were convicted of crimes in other countries, is the idea here that they have escaped their punishment? Like thats a significant concern? Seems like a lot of prison breaks!
Or is it that perhaps they were convicted but not punished enough (for us), so we have to correct that?
Or something else? If they were convicted of a crime in another country, it suggests that justice has been doled out already, right?
Watch the video or read this report from Human Rights Watch [1].
> The Trump administration claimed that the majority of Venezuelans sent to CECOT were members of the Venezuelan organized crime group Tren de Aragua.
> Only [3.1% of the 226/252 Venezuelan prisoners in CECOT] had been convicted of a violent or potentially violent offense.
> Human Rights Watch reviewed documents in 58 of the 130 documented cases of people held in CECOT, and all indicated that they did not have criminal records in Venezuela or other countries in Latin America.
CECOT was already found to violate the UN’s minimum treatment of prisoners rights (aka “The Nelson Mandela Rules”) [2] by a report of the US.
Trump’s administration blatantly violates human rights.
Finally, here is a report investigating why the US can use the El Salavador prison [3].
> It has been clear from the beginning what Trump wants from El Salvador: an ally who would accept, and even imprison, deportees. Less clear has been what Bukele might want from the United States. In striking the deal with the Salvadoran president, Trump has effectively undercut the Vulcan investigation and shielded Bukele from further scrutiny, current and former U.S. officials said.
This, and Larry Ellison buying all news outlets in America. Things should be happening quickly enough so that it's obvious where this is all going, right?
Whoever writes the next "Inglorious Basterds" should have a lot of fun parodying Larry...
People in the US now have to use VPN’s to get access to domestic news from a foreign country. I think it’s fair to say that the wheels have come off democracy and things are badly broken.
It's worth noting that the founders of the Lemkin Institute have, between them, held multiple leadership roles in reputable academic departments devoted to the study of genocide, and have also both been on the ground during or shortly after genocides or other crimes against humanity as part of international teams tasked with figuring out what happened and how to hold perpetrators accountable. These are not some lightweight bloggers.
The US government, in particular Kristi Noem, Donald Trump, and Marco Rubio, are, by the logic of the legal power they themselves invoked, war criminals who rightly belong in the Hague.
I tried to make the title fit the guidelines and the character limit, then changed it when the community explained why it was important for A16Z to be in the title.
Why do people think we're motivated to “suppress” negative stories about A16Z? They've been criticized forever here and we've never had a problem with it. All we care about is whether a topic makes for an interesting discussion on HN.
To answer your literal question of "why do people think..."
For a while there was a widespread standing principle to not assume malice for actions that could be explained as a simple mistake. If only one person follows this policy, it's great. However, so many people were following this policy that it created massive incentives to disguise profit motivated malice as explainable accidents. We're in the midst of a massive backswing against this.
So, there is very little taste for patience when agents of ycombinator make mistakes that benefit a16z such as accidentally removing them from the title of a negative article, due to the billions of dollars entangling ycombinator with the reputation of a16z. This is not because it wasn't an accident- it's because any culture of patience with this will lead (and has led) to an explosion of copycat whoopsies.
> Why do people think we're motivated to “suppress” negative stories about A16Z?
I think a more charitable interpretation of this kind of argument is that the money and power that entities like A16Z have make the possibility of corruption of endeavours like HN trivial.
In light of the ease in which a wealthy entity like A16Z can exert influence over an entity like HN and the track records of various A16Z adjacent/similar people doing similar things to other HN-like entities it's very natural that people are concerned about the possibility of similar things happening here.
Like it or not as an editor at HN you're in a position of power and influence and others with far greater power would certainly leverage what you have here if suited their interests.
Avoiding even the appearance of impropriety is no easy task especially in this medium and I don't envy you in taking it on, but it's an essential part of something like HN. If the users in aggregate don't trust the moderation process or the administrators then this all sort of falls apart and the interesting discussion suffers.
I also got punished for calling it out. I'm rate-limited and can't submit new links. Guess Tom was being shifty by making it look like I "won" the arguement while being a dick behind the scenes with the moderation controls against my account.
This is false. Nothing was done to your account at that time, whereas rate-limiting was active on your account at least two weeks ago. Rate limiting is applied to accounts that do things like use HN for political/ideological battle, or post too many low-quality comments, both of which you've been doing. Here are some of the worst of the comments you've been posting in recent months.
The A16Z title issue was no great scandal. It was bog standard moderation, with attention and responsiveness to community sentiment and feedback. That kind of thing happens all the time.
Meanwhile, you post too many comments that break the guidelines and use HN against its intended purpose. HN is only a place people want participate because others make an effort to keep the standards up rather than dragging them down. Please do your part to make HN better not worse if you want to participate here.
My own experience is that they've been solid throughout. Certainly better than many other options, at a time when the technical press has been generally disappointing.
I asked last year and was told 404 is the source of too many copycat low quality posts and they have a paywall. In the year since, a bunch of their original reporting has hit the front page and driven interesting discussions.
Just to clarify for anyone reading. 404 does not have a paywall. They have an account wall. Some articles require you to be signed into a free account to read.
You should probably revisit the guidelines, as your flagging policy doesn’t align with HN guidelines:
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
The qualifier "most" is very important there. Certainly opinions can differ as to what should fall under "most" and what shouldn't. But citing that line to justify flagging a politics-related story isn't a good argument.
Yep - I totally got that from your original comment.
I did think to myself "I hope they're using the Richard Feynmann/MIT Model Railroad Club sense of the work "hacking" there, not the "dude in a hoodie in front of a green on black terminal" sense. HN, for me, for over a decade, has been a source of intellectual curiosity provoking links, not just software/computing related stuff.
My attendances at DEF-CON have been mostly grey-hat [0]. I don't really care about downvotes just here to spread knowledge on topics I find interesting.
Thanks for the sanity/perspective.
[0] I'm in the XX documentary, and have been on stage (as have many friends), but never as an official speaker. In a former digital life, I ran a lockpicking youtubey with millions of views.
There's also some other relevance to tech here, given the role of the Ellisons in all this. It's quite possible the decision to pull the episode came from them. Paramount is trying steal Warner Bros out from under Netflix and is working the Trump admin hard to prevent the deal, even supposedly by telling Trump he can decide who gets hired/fired from CNN.
Andreessen was directly involved in the rise of Bari Weiss too.
I hate to attack HN and especially any particular moderator. But I agree in the abstract that this is an unacceptable performance. When you have Larry Ellison's son appoint a political figure over a news organization and start axing things, that's Tech news-worthy.
And once any degree of censorship is involved by mainstream media the burden of open-ness goes up 10x in my opinion. At least I personally hadn't seen this article until today, and then the one I saw disappeared from the front page. I'm sorry but this story is more important than source code for photoshop 1.0 or whatever currently has the top slot.
I say this not because I think "Oh other people need to know this" I say this because I think "I need to know this" stuff and I almost didn't. I'm sure there are many well-read people on here, but for me this site is my main/only(?) news source.
Personally I'd recommend a post-mortem into this (exactly how many flags, by who?, is political news susceptible to getting falsely flagged and if so is there a way to rework that system? Perhaps let individual users disable "political news" on their own accounts? Can people "kill" a story by baiting a bunch of stupid comments on it to get its discussion number too high?)
I understand HN wasn't started as an attempt to make some free press democratized web 2.0 news. But in the current news climate where there president is personally doing shit like getting Jimmy Kimmel axed I think HN has had a greater role thrust upon it than mere startup news.
[I can't imagine it would be considered, but implicit in this frustration is a willingness to volunteer my own time to contribute toward fixing this issue as an engineer - be it gathering/analyzing the data or whatever form]
It's a bummer, but discussions about the intersections of politics and tech are especially important when many prominent figures in SV are inserting themselves directly into politics or are funding inherently political projects. It's clear, for many of them, their values are misaligned with many core democratic values and sometimes even human rights.
Musk and DOGE killed an estimated 600,000 people, mostly kids under 5, and the death hasn't abated yet. Tech workers helped him do it.
If you'd rather not be the kind of useful idiot who helps a megalomaniacal tech billionaire rack up the body count of an early 20th century despot, politics are unfortunately unavoidable.
It's almost assuredly paid actors, the kind who brigade every single comment section no matter how piddly the outlet anytime there's a peep of pro-Palestinian, pro-abortion or whatever the culture-war generals are focusing their troops on.
Tbh HN does a _lot_ better dealing with this than pretty much anywhere. Yes HN has the flagging feature so of course it will get abused but as evidenced by this article sitting now at the top of HN, it gets addressed by moderator intervention, regularly.
>> I've been watching this 60min piece, and there's nothing wrong with is
It's not even that good of a story IMO; leading to full-on Streisand effect when it's easier than ever to find things on the interwebs, and double-impossible to suppress them. About all this has done is prevented the 60 minutes demo from viewing a story they would have immediately forgotten, and prompted a far more dangerous to the status quo & resourceful segment to go find & view a show they never watch.
There is a strong ideological lean on HN towards not necessarily the trump ethos, but more toward the technofeudalist ideal, which is currently broadly aligned with trump on many issues. It's also trumpisim in a more sophisticated hat, but it's adherents don't seem to think so.
Everyone here tries way too hard to emulate the Musks of the world as if their political beliefs were the reason those guys initially got so rich and successful.
It's even more craven and intellectually bankrupt than Trumpism, which at least has the simple honesty of "say good thing make good thing happen" and is broadly believed by people too stupid to know better.
Lets be more accurate: none of the powerful & rich are strong supporters OF trump; they support him strongLY because of the direct pay-offs they personally gain. I think it's important to differentiate between the Andreessens and your core MAGA supporter who I actually believe he is a god, because strategies for defeating them are very different.
It only takes a few flags to be effective and there are definitely more than a few Trumpists on HN so theoretically yes. Could also be the likely much larger contingent of people who flag all "political" and "non-technical" content by default.
Like it or not Hacker News has never been (and will never be) a platform for free and open debate. It's designed around aggressive curation for quality over quantity and that makes it very easy to brigade by design.
> Could also be the likely much larger contingent of people who flag all "political" and "non-technical" content by default.
It could, but that'd be odd. We've seen oodles of structurally similar posts hang out on the front page unflagged before. There are even past examples of major posts criticizing the journalistic integrity of 60 Minutes. Only once the material becomes critical of the regime does it become flagged.
As an American whose mental health struggled for a while after the election, I now thoroughly curate my media diet so that I only get "just enough" political news. So I understand your desire.
However, HN has huge sway over tech culture, for better or worse (probably worse). Many of the wealthiest and most influential fascists in America also run companies that HN users might work at or strive to work at. Probably not because they're fascists, but because they mostly care about the cool tech they use or just want a better job.
Applicants and employees of ̶I̶B̶M̶ Palantir, ̶I̶G̶ ̶F̶a̶r̶b̶e̶n̶ Tesla, and ̶K̶o̶d̶a̶k̶ Oracle should know what they're supporting. If they take the job anyway, at least we know whose side they're on.
I don't know if it's so much about making sure these people know what they're supporting but it's definitely significant that this is one of the few places where you can have a dialogue with the people who work at these companies.
It's actually a far less effective enforcement scheme than even Obama used both in absolute numbers and in priority.
The Trump admin is stuffing the processing queue (which is normally overwhelmed with high-priority cases) with thousands of low-priority cases, which actually has the effect of keeping dangerous people (always been high-priority) in the country longer.
Just what you'd expect from a totally braindead manager. Looks great if you're a malicious moron though!
And what do you call it if you slow down the processing, fill it with innocent people, and also get yourself bogged down in thousands of extremely costly (time, money, and focus) civil rights lawsuits?
Sure, if you can think of better deterrents for migration and better ways to deport more people, then those should be tried as well.
Right now I think these measures are extremely effective, especially at deterrence and I do not see what your arguments against this being an effective deterrence really is. One good step from the legislative would be removing the legal basis for the civil rights lawsuits, so they can be thrown out immediately.
In our country, someone who hasn't been convicted or otherwise adjudicated of a crime is called innocent. There are thousands of innocent people being deported.
Perhaps these people committed crimes or administrative violations, perhaps not, but until they've been determined as such, they're correctly called innocent with no quotes.
GP is speaking specifically about that subset of people when they use the word innocent.
If you're interested in the ancient Maya, El Salvador doesn't come close to Guatemala or Mexico (followed by Belize and Honduras). These are also wonderful places to visit, IMHO.
CECOT is terrible, and the fact that the US sent them to give a message is criminal.
But the overarching culprit here is the Venezuelan regime. These people ran away from Venezuela in search for a new life; Just today a girl was sentenced to 10 years in prison just for printing a shirt of Chavez's statue falling. last week a 17 year old was sentenced to 10 years in jail just because he protested after the elections were stolen from them...
Two wrongs don't make a right. The US was wrong to instigate Russia by violating Baker's verbal promise to not move NATO "one inch east" (and then playing the "nanny nanny boo boo, we were crossing our fingers / didn't sign it on paper, so it doesn't count" card). That did destabilize the pre-existing balance of regional power the region and pose an existential threat to Russia's security interests.
Russia responding by choosing to "take down the regime" in Ukraine by invading a sovereign nation was also wrong. There was justification, there was reason, but that doesn't make it right.
The US is playing the role of Russia when it comes to Venezuela. The US has real reasons to be unhappy with what's going on, even if it's not quite at the same level of the US' geopolitical adversaries positioning nuclear weapons just a few hundred miles from the US capitol. The US having justification and reason to support discontent with Venezuela is not license to invade Venezuela. This was also true for Libya, for Iraq, for Vietnam, for every victim of US imperial aggression.
The US has to stop. The US is not the world's policeman, and the US had no legitimate right to declare itself such.
Want to do something about black market drug smuggling? Try destroying the black market. Take the Portugal approach.
Reasonable? They ALL boil down to "we need to get official comments, rationale and explanations from the administration". They refused to comment on the story, so you wait because if they CHOOSE not to participate you don't get to publish? That's never been how reporting works. Her comments about a lack of detail regarding the criminal records & charges? The administration is the party that refuses to share this! They are not even forthcoming with WHO EXACTLY has been deported.
Bari Weiss bending over backwards to accomodate an administration that has never shown any sort of honesty or humanity is exactly why she was rewarded so handsomely. "They seem reasonable" is not even remotely close, when comparing "evidence-based truth" reporting with the president's "I speak the truth".
If you wait for the administration to comment on a story before you publish it you’re effectively giving them the right to veto it. You ask, give them a deadline. If they don’t respond or say no comment (as they did in this case) then you publish.
> The person doing this 60 minute segment has also pushed false stories in the past
You’re going to need to elaborate on that. If it were true why wouldn’t Weiss just fire them?
The arguments are nonsense. A summary is Weiss wants to make a case for the administration, which already has the largest platform in the world. If the administration wants to make a case for itself, it has (and has had) ample time to do so. As it stands, there is already a lengthy paper trail of arguments the administration has made in court. These arguments should take precedence over throwaway statements an admin rep might make to a news program.
Briefly, on a couple of them:
- "We then say that only 8 of the 252 have been sentenced in America for violent offenses. But what about charged?" In the US, those people are known as "innocent," whether or not Weiss likes that fact.
- Holding a story until the administration is willing to go on record is exactly the same as giving the administration a veto over a story. We would not have adversarial journalism under these circumstances.
- "The admin has argued in court that detainees are due "judicial review" —and we should explain this" These men were sent for indefinite detention to a concentration camp outside the US borders, and then the administration argued in court that it could not affect any change in their status. This argument from Weiss is transparently false.
I also wonder if this story will get the type of leeway to stay on HN to collect the 200+ upvotes and 300+ comments of that previous example or if it will be flagged off the front page within minutes like so many other similar stories.
EDIT: No idea how long this post actually lasted, but checking in an hour later to see this has been flagged completely off the first 10 pages of HN despite getting close to that 200 point total.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23759283
Also, it’s not unheard of for people working on the op-ed side of the house to become editors in chief. Most notable example I can think of would be Katharine Viner at the Guardian. And in the reverse, James Bennet went from being editor in chief at the Atlantic to running the op-ed page at the NYT.
She is more or less an Israeli propaganda agent. She was hired at CBS because, after purchasing CBS from Zionist Shari Redstone, Zionist Larry Ellison and his son needed a reliable Zionist editor in chief. Weiss’ primary qualifications are her extremely pro Israeli career path.
Larry Ellison needed a woman like Weiss because he’s invested in Israel’s success. He’s both a close personal friend of Netanyahu and the number one private donor to the IDF. Netanyahu has declared US public perception of Israel as the 8th front of their war, and Ellison (with the help of Trump) is doing his part stateside.
Why we have so many powerful “Americans” exercising their power on behalf of a foreign country is the real discussion here.
I suspect she was hired at least in part because she would be willing to take the heat for stuff like this,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46361571
A once-reasonable friend of mine genuinely thinks RJK is just some dude who tries his best, and doesn't consider him a crazy anti-vaxxer. Crazy
As much as it would be comforting for all dudes who’re trying their best to pretend otherwise, the two are not mutually exclusive. (No opinion on whether RFK Jr is in the intersection—I’m not in the US and couldn’t affect his actions even if I tried.)
Hi all,
I’m writing with specific guidance on what I’d like for us to do to advance the CECOT story. I know you’d all like to see this run as soon as possible; I feel the same way. But if we run the piece as is, we’d be doing our viewers a disservice.
Last month many outlets, most notably The New York Times, exposed the horrific conditions at CECOT. Our story presents more of these powerful testimonies—and putting those accounts into the public record is valuable in and of itself. But if we’re going to run another story about a topic that has by now been much-covered we need to advance it. Among the ways to do so: does anyone in the administration or anyone prominent who defended the use of the Alien Enemies Act now regret it in light of what these Venezuelans endured at CECOT? That’s a question I’d like to see asked and answered.
- At present, we do not present the administration’s argument for why it sent 252 Venezuelans to CECOT. What we have is Karoline Leavitt’s soundbite claiming they are evildoers in America (rapists, murderers, etc.). But isn’t there much more to ask in light of the torture that we are revealing? Tom Homan and Stephen Miller don’t tend to be shy. I realize we’ve emailed the DHS spox, but we need to push much harder to get these principals on the record.
- The data we present paints an incongruent picture. Of the 252 Venezuelans sent to CECOT, we say nearly half have no criminal histories. In other words, more than half do have criminal histories. We should spend a beat explaining this. We then say that only 8 of the 252 have been sentenced in America for violent offenses. But what about charged? My point is that we should include as much as we can possibly know and understand about these individuals.
- Secretary Noem’s trip to CECOT. We report that she took pictures and video there with MS-13 gang members, not TdA members, with no comment from her or her staff about what her goal on that trip was, or what she saw there, or if she had or has concerns about the treatment of detainees like the ones in our piece. I also think that the ensuing analysis from the Berkeley students is strange. The pictures are alarming; we should include them. But what does the analysis add?
- We need to do a better job of explaining the legal rationale by which the administration detained and deported these 252 Venezuelans to CECOT. It’s not as simple as Trump invoking the Alien Enemies Act and being able to deport them immediately. And that isn’t the administration’s argument. The admin has argued in court that detainees are due “judicial review”—and we should explain this, with a voice arguing that Trump is exceeding his authority under the relevant statute, and another arguing that he’s operating within the bounds of his authority. There’s a genuine debate here. If we cut down Kristi Noem analysis we’d have the time.
My general view here is that we do our viewers the best service by presenting them with the full context they need to assess the story. In other words, I believe we need to do more reporting here.
I am eager and available to help. I tracked down cell numbers for Homan and Miller and sent those along. Please let me know how I can support you.
Yours,
Bari
> Of the 252 Venezuelans sent to CECOT, we say nearly half have no criminal histories. In other words, more than half do have criminal histories. We should spend a beat explaining this.
The story isn't that people found guilty of crimes went to jail, the story is that half weren't even charged with crimes! That's the whole point of the story! We should not be aiming for a balanced diet of criminals and not-criminals in our government-sponsored foreign death camps!
The fact that they exist at all is an affront to humanity, but to say "it's OK because a slim majority deserve it"- I just don't know what to say.
> We then say that only 8 of the 252 have been sentenced in America for violent offenses. But what about charged?
What about charged? What does charged with a crime have to do with anything? Why bring that up at all? Do we send people to prison because they were charged with a crime? Is Bari Weiss a newborn baby who has never heard about the presumption of innocence?
I feel sick.
You don’t hold a story because you want to push the government harder to respond, especially when you have the executive’s official spokesperson giving a reason on the record already.
And what does she mean that we should spend a beat explaining that half do have criminal histories? She wants them to give a cookie for that? And why is being charged relevant? You don’t send someone to prison for life for being charged.
Lastly she misstates the administrations legal justification for deportation. She doesn’t appear to be an unbiased actor here.
The fact she sent that out publicly is a good indication of how prejudiced she will be with editorial content.
You had a good run 60 Minutes.
The reporters reached out to the govt for comment. They chose not to respond. If you insist on holding off publishing until you have a comment you’ve just given the government the ability to block the story by endlessly delaying comment.
Bari thinks the government should be able to quash any story it wants by simply refusing to "present the administration's argument."
8105370ed7dba50dc7ec659fd67550569b4dd8a0
What's the best torrent client nowadays?
https://www.qbittorrent.org/
I’m still using it happily on windows/linux.
Don’t forget your vpn!
We're not going anywhere.
—Hydra
I'm honestly speechless. But thanks for the magnet link.
This is disgraceful [0], whatever your opinion on illegal immigration.
[0] deporting non-citizens to 3rd-party countries/prisons
"Prison" is for people convicted of crimes.
See perhaps United States Declaration of Independence:
> "For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offenses:"
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievances_of_the_United_State...
Also, any recommendations for a news site that doesn't suppress news? Asking for a friend.
HN?
https://x.com/grynbaum/status/2002943084322287815
https://x.com/grynbaum/status/2003109023705387478
https://x.com/grynbaum/status/2003209942057255073
https://xcancel.com/grynbaum/status/2002943084322287815
https://xcancel.com/grynbaum/status/2003109023705387478
https://xcancel.com/grynbaum/status/2003209942057255073
> The Trump administration has repeatedly claimed that the men sent to El Salvador were overwhelmingly violent criminals; Pro Publica reported that the administration knew at least 197 of the men had not been convicted of crimes in the United States, and six had been convicted of violent offenses.
https://www.404media.co/archivists-posted-the-60-minutes-cec...
I wonder if we could set up a system where the government has an opportunity to share its evidence and the public gets an opportunity to scrutinize it on a case-by-case basis so they can fully understand whether their government is acting appropriately.
Just a random little thought I had...
Or is it that perhaps they were convicted but not punished enough (for us), so we have to correct that?
Or something else? If they were convicted of a crime in another country, it suggests that justice has been doled out already, right?
> The Trump administration claimed that the majority of Venezuelans sent to CECOT were members of the Venezuelan organized crime group Tren de Aragua.
> Only [3.1% of the 226/252 Venezuelan prisoners in CECOT] had been convicted of a violent or potentially violent offense.
> Human Rights Watch reviewed documents in 58 of the 130 documented cases of people held in CECOT, and all indicated that they did not have criminal records in Venezuela or other countries in Latin America.
CECOT was already found to violate the UN’s minimum treatment of prisoners rights (aka “The Nelson Mandela Rules”) [2] by a report of the US.
Trump’s administration blatantly violates human rights.
Finally, here is a report investigating why the US can use the El Salavador prison [3].
> It has been clear from the beginning what Trump wants from El Salvador: an ally who would accept, and even imprison, deportees. Less clear has been what Bukele might want from the United States. In striking the deal with the Salvadoran president, Trump has effectively undercut the Vulcan investigation and shielded Bukele from further scrutiny, current and former U.S. officials said.
[1] https://www.hrw.org/report/2025/11/12/you-have-arrived-in-he...
[2] https://www.unodc.org/documents/justice-and-prison-reform/Ne...
[3] https://www.propublica.org/article/bukele-trump-el-salvador-...
Whoever writes the next "Inglorious Basterds" should have a lot of fun parodying Larry...
The US government, in particular Kristi Noem, Donald Trump, and Marco Rubio, are, by the logic of the legal power they themselves invoked, war criminals who rightly belong in the Hague.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/business/60-minutes-trump...
CBS defends pulling 60 Minutes segment about Trump deportations
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdrnv3keeneo
or
‘60 Minutes’ Pulled a Segment. A Correspondent Calls It ‘Political.’
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/business/60-minutes-trump...
But: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=404media.co sure has a lot of [dead]
Why do people think we're motivated to “suppress” negative stories about A16Z? They've been criticized forever here and we've never had a problem with it. All we care about is whether a topic makes for an interesting discussion on HN.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
For a while there was a widespread standing principle to not assume malice for actions that could be explained as a simple mistake. If only one person follows this policy, it's great. However, so many people were following this policy that it created massive incentives to disguise profit motivated malice as explainable accidents. We're in the midst of a massive backswing against this.
So, there is very little taste for patience when agents of ycombinator make mistakes that benefit a16z such as accidentally removing them from the title of a negative article, due to the billions of dollars entangling ycombinator with the reputation of a16z. This is not because it wasn't an accident- it's because any culture of patience with this will lead (and has led) to an explosion of copycat whoopsies.
I think a more charitable interpretation of this kind of argument is that the money and power that entities like A16Z have make the possibility of corruption of endeavours like HN trivial.
In light of the ease in which a wealthy entity like A16Z can exert influence over an entity like HN and the track records of various A16Z adjacent/similar people doing similar things to other HN-like entities it's very natural that people are concerned about the possibility of similar things happening here.
Like it or not as an editor at HN you're in a position of power and influence and others with far greater power would certainly leverage what you have here if suited their interests.
Avoiding even the appearance of impropriety is no easy task especially in this medium and I don't envy you in taking it on, but it's an essential part of something like HN. If the users in aggregate don't trust the moderation process or the administrators then this all sort of falls apart and the interesting discussion suffers.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46347561
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46335424
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46300618
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46272934
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46148458
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45821460
The A16Z title issue was no great scandal. It was bog standard moderation, with attention and responsiveness to community sentiment and feedback. That kind of thing happens all the time.
Meanwhile, you post too many comments that break the guidelines and use HN against its intended purpose. HN is only a place people want participate because others make an effort to keep the standards up rather than dragging them down. Please do your part to make HN better not worse if you want to participate here.
I've posted about some and they just get instaflagged or hidden.
Tell HN: Paywalls with workarounds are OK; paywall complaints are off topic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 - Sept 2015 (160 comments)
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
I did think to myself "I hope they're using the Richard Feynmann/MIT Model Railroad Club sense of the work "hacking" there, not the "dude in a hoodie in front of a green on black terminal" sense. HN, for me, for over a decade, has been a source of intellectual curiosity provoking links, not just software/computing related stuff.
My attendances at DEF-CON have been mostly grey-hat [0]. I don't really care about downvotes just here to spread knowledge on topics I find interesting.
Thanks for the sanity/perspective.
[0] I'm in the XX documentary, and have been on stage (as have many friends), but never as an official speaker. In a former digital life, I ran a lockpicking youtubey with millions of views.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.
Your post was intentionally disingenuous, and we really don’t need more of that around here.
Andreessen was directly involved in the rise of Bari Weiss too.
And once any degree of censorship is involved by mainstream media the burden of open-ness goes up 10x in my opinion. At least I personally hadn't seen this article until today, and then the one I saw disappeared from the front page. I'm sorry but this story is more important than source code for photoshop 1.0 or whatever currently has the top slot.
I say this not because I think "Oh other people need to know this" I say this because I think "I need to know this" stuff and I almost didn't. I'm sure there are many well-read people on here, but for me this site is my main/only(?) news source.
Personally I'd recommend a post-mortem into this (exactly how many flags, by who?, is political news susceptible to getting falsely flagged and if so is there a way to rework that system? Perhaps let individual users disable "political news" on their own accounts? Can people "kill" a story by baiting a bunch of stupid comments on it to get its discussion number too high?)
I understand HN wasn't started as an attempt to make some free press democratized web 2.0 news. But in the current news climate where there president is personally doing shit like getting Jimmy Kimmel axed I think HN has had a greater role thrust upon it than mere startup news.
[I can't imagine it would be considered, but implicit in this frustration is a willingness to volunteer my own time to contribute toward fixing this issue as an engineer - be it gathering/analyzing the data or whatever form]
Musk and DOGE killed an estimated 600,000 people, mostly kids under 5, and the death hasn't abated yet. Tech workers helped him do it.
If you'd rather not be the kind of useful idiot who helps a megalomaniacal tech billionaire rack up the body count of an early 20th century despot, politics are unfortunately unavoidable.
I've been watching this 60min piece, and there's nothing wrong with is. It's journalism well done.
Do Trumpist minions have their ways on HN?
Tbh HN does a _lot_ better dealing with this than pretty much anywhere. Yes HN has the flagging feature so of course it will get abused but as evidenced by this article sitting now at the top of HN, it gets addressed by moderator intervention, regularly.
It's not even that good of a story IMO; leading to full-on Streisand effect when it's easier than ever to find things on the interwebs, and double-impossible to suppress them. About all this has done is prevented the 60 minutes demo from viewing a story they would have immediately forgotten, and prompted a far more dangerous to the status quo & resourceful segment to go find & view a show they never watch.
Like it or not Hacker News has never been (and will never be) a platform for free and open debate. It's designed around aggressive curation for quality over quantity and that makes it very easy to brigade by design.
It could, but that'd be odd. We've seen oodles of structurally similar posts hang out on the front page unflagged before. There are even past examples of major posts criticizing the journalistic integrity of 60 Minutes. Only once the material becomes critical of the regime does it become flagged.
However, HN has huge sway over tech culture, for better or worse (probably worse). Many of the wealthiest and most influential fascists in America also run companies that HN users might work at or strive to work at. Probably not because they're fascists, but because they mostly care about the cool tech they use or just want a better job.
Applicants and employees of ̶I̶B̶M̶ Palantir, ̶I̶G̶ ̶F̶a̶r̶b̶e̶n̶ Tesla, and ̶K̶o̶d̶a̶k̶ Oracle should know what they're supporting. If they take the job anyway, at least we know whose side they're on.
The Trump admin is stuffing the processing queue (which is normally overwhelmed with high-priority cases) with thousands of low-priority cases, which actually has the effect of keeping dangerous people (always been high-priority) in the country longer.
Just what you'd expect from a totally braindead manager. Looks great if you're a malicious moron though!
>which actually has the effect of keeping dangerous people (always been high-priority) in the country longer.
I agree. The processing should be much faster. The detentions are so stupid, just get them on a plane.
> the processing should be much faster
And what do you call it if you slow down the processing, fill it with innocent people, and also get yourself bogged down in thousands of extremely costly (time, money, and focus) civil rights lawsuits?
Answer: a very stupid policy.
Right now I think these measures are extremely effective, especially at deterrence and I do not see what your arguments against this being an effective deterrence really is. One good step from the legislative would be removing the legal basis for the civil rights lawsuits, so they can be thrown out immediately.
Perhaps these people committed crimes or administrative violations, perhaps not, but until they've been determined as such, they're correctly called innocent with no quotes.
GP is speaking specifically about that subset of people when they use the word innocent.
But the overarching culprit here is the Venezuelan regime. These people ran away from Venezuela in search for a new life; Just today a girl was sentenced to 10 years in prison just for printing a shirt of Chavez's statue falling. last week a 17 year old was sentenced to 10 years in jail just because he protested after the elections were stolen from them...
The only solution is to taken down the regime
Russia responding by choosing to "take down the regime" in Ukraine by invading a sovereign nation was also wrong. There was justification, there was reason, but that doesn't make it right.
The US is playing the role of Russia when it comes to Venezuela. The US has real reasons to be unhappy with what's going on, even if it's not quite at the same level of the US' geopolitical adversaries positioning nuclear weapons just a few hundred miles from the US capitol. The US having justification and reason to support discontent with Venezuela is not license to invade Venezuela. This was also true for Libya, for Iraq, for Vietnam, for every victim of US imperial aggression.
The US has to stop. The US is not the world's policeman, and the US had no legitimate right to declare itself such.
Want to do something about black market drug smuggling? Try destroying the black market. Take the Portugal approach.
https://x.com/thesimonetti/status/2003142908854313225
They seem reasonable. The person doing this 60 minute segment has also pushed false stories in the past, which make her concern more relevant.
Bari Weiss bending over backwards to accomodate an administration that has never shown any sort of honesty or humanity is exactly why she was rewarded so handsomely. "They seem reasonable" is not even remotely close, when comparing "evidence-based truth" reporting with the president's "I speak the truth".
If you wait for the administration to comment on a story before you publish it you’re effectively giving them the right to veto it. You ask, give them a deadline. If they don’t respond or say no comment (as they did in this case) then you publish.
> The person doing this 60 minute segment has also pushed false stories in the past
You’re going to need to elaborate on that. If it were true why wouldn’t Weiss just fire them?
Briefly, on a couple of them:
- "We then say that only 8 of the 252 have been sentenced in America for violent offenses. But what about charged?" In the US, those people are known as "innocent," whether or not Weiss likes that fact.
- Holding a story until the administration is willing to go on record is exactly the same as giving the administration a veto over a story. We would not have adversarial journalism under these circumstances.
- "The admin has argued in court that detainees are due "judicial review" —and we should explain this" These men were sent for indefinite detention to a concentration camp outside the US borders, and then the administration argued in court that it could not affect any change in their status. This argument from Weiss is transparently false.