And this is usually one of the defining traits of a senior engineer. They understand the tech and its limitations, and thus are able to look around corners, ask good questions, and, overall, provide quality product input.
Programs are a socially constructed artifact that help communicate and express a model (which is perpetually locked in people's heads with variance across engineers; divergence is addressed as the program develops). Determining what should or should not be done is a matter of not just domain knowledge, but practical reason, which is to say prudence, which is a virtue that can only be acquired by experience. It is an ability to apply universal principles to particular situations.
This is why young devs, even when clever in some local sense, are worse at understanding the right moves to make in context. Code does not stand alone. It exists entirely in the service of something and is bound by constraints that are external to it.
I've always held dang in pretty high regard seeing his answers on controversial topics, and haven't seen what you said above.
Do you actually have to provide a reason for flagging a post? If so, I would love to see the reasoning behind flagging this one, and dang's reason for keeping it that way. But of course, this is a private website, so I'd understand, albeit disappointingly so, if this is buried.
>Do you actually have to provide a reason for flagging a post?
not at all, you click one button and you're done.
>and dang's reason for keeping it that way
I can dig up some recent responses if you wish, but his responses came down to "I think this is what the community wants" and "these topics are flamewar bait".
> I've always held dang in pretty high regard seeing his answers on controversial topics,
He's probably one of the best moderators on the internet. Thoughtful, patient, level-headed - determined to keep controversy to a minimum here, no matter what the controversy is.
Tech companies aiding genocide? US torture chiefs given top positions in the tech field? Post-adolescent racist ex-hackers given physical access to federal systems managing trillions of dollars? Too controversial. Maybe let one post a month slip through, maybe not.
The effect of suppressing this discussion, in dang's view, is to save HN from becoming a toxic flamewar wasteland like everywhere else on the internet.
There is another effect though - to whitewash techbro crimes, like aiding torture, genocide, and treason. That these crimes just happen to be making tech billionaires a lot of money (contracts, tax cuts, hush money, back scratching deals etc) is not relevant to dang's stated goal of creating a safe space where people can discuss number theory and computer games without too much reality creeping in.
You can see some of the many flagged DOGE stories in my favorites. Any that appear unflagged in there were only unflagged after hours of being suppressed, by which time the algorithm puts them on page 5 or 6.
And you can see dang's response to my request for a dedicated thread on this topic here [0]. That's the level of debate, and dang doesn't make any attempt to hide it. Posts requesting a discussion on all the false flags lately get some initial traction, and are then flagged within minutes.
> Do you actually have to provide a reason for flagging a post?
Nope. It's an incredibly easy system to game; and this is explicitly by design to keep HN nice and anodyne, ie, inoffensive and utterly ineffectual against any group that is motivated enough to make a few legit looking HN accounts.
Is this sufficient in a time where you can verbally ask an AI to start a few HN accounts and make them look real? Dang says, shut up, Hacker News isn't a place for discussing hackers taking over federal systems. And we want that, apparently, despite all evidence to the contrary.
This is very relevant w.r.t. HN being LLM-related and to the current political climate. It is also easily verifiable as a few X/Grok links on this thread show. Why is it flagged?
I think what Grok's team did was deadly wrong. I didn't flag this submission. Instead, I'd rather see discussions. So this is just my speculation: people on the left on HN flagged the posts they didn't like left and right, and they loved to attack one's motives. So, it's only fair game that people who support Elon or Trump or whatever flag the posts they don't like. The Iron Law of Reciprocity, right? Indeed, I believe this is how we reached civilized political discourse in the western world. Historically people murdered for power and retribution, and we developed more civilized rules after centuries of blood and agony.
Is there some entropy or randomness at play here? Or some sort of RAG? Even if it was RAG, the "reasoning" is very different and doesn't mention the clear censorship in the initial prompt that the one I linked mentions.
Property taxes work like that. People sometimes sell houses because they can't afford their property taxes when their assets increase in value substantially. Not saying I agree with that or not, but it is reality today.
You can get close with a Cognito Identity Pool that exchanges your user's keys for AWS credentials associated with an IAM role that has access to the resources you want to read/write on their behalf. Pretty standard pattern.
edit: I think I misread your comment. I understood it as your app wanting to delegate access to a user's data to the client, but it seems like you want the user to delegate access to their own data to your app? Different use-cases.
