Trump has now posted himself as the Pope AND as Jesus, but still hasn't posted a single critical word about Putin. At this point the Vatican has a higher threat level than the Kremlin.
Jared? Sounds familiar, is it a friend of yours? If yes should you not disclose it? The casual first name use basis is a tell. You wouldn't say "glad Bill is cooking something up" about Gates. This kind of parasocial familiarity with billionaires is how PR becomes indistinguishable from fan fiction.
Isaacman is a space tourist, not an astronaut. He is the CEO of Shift4 Payments, which processes payments for SpaceX. Musk, who spent hundreds of millions on Trump's campaign, got him installed as NASA administrator. That's not meritocracy, it's transactional politics. If you or I had billions, we could also buy seats on rockets.
"His own version of Gemini" is wild spin. Polaris was Isaacman paying SpaceX to fly him on SpaceX hardware. He had no engineering role, no mission design input. Calling it "his Gemini program" is like calling a chartered yacht trip "your naval program." Naming something after a historic NASA program doesn't make it one.
The risk decision process was theater. Isaacman reportedly had already decided Artemis II would proceed, then invited Dr. Charlie Camarda and others to a "transparent review" that was anything but.
When the conclusion is predetermined and dissenting experts are brought in for optics, that's not risk management, it's liability laundering.
On the 1-in-30 mortality figure, framing astronauts making it home as something to be "grateful" for, rather than questioning why we're accepting odds 3x worse than the Shuttle (which killed 14 people), is a strange way to celebrate progress...
We should be glad the crew is safe. We should also be honest that the person running NASA got there through financial entanglements with SpaceX, not aerospace credentials
Almost everything you said is false, but to pick on a couple of issues, on Polaris Dawn he did the same tests and reported results just like the spacesuit engineer that flew with him to test the spacesuits in space. That transparent review was enough to convince skeptical experts, journalists and the astronauts that the issues were understood and the work arounds adequate.
I think your projection is the beam in your eye you are blinded by.
"Almost everything you said is false" and yet you could not name one thing. If my claims were wrong, you would correct them. You did not, because you can't.
You claim the Artemis II review convinced skeptical experts.What actually happened was Isaacman ( or shoud I say Jared? ) convened a January meeting to present NASA rationale for flying a heat shield they already knew was flawed.
CNN was denied access, only two journalists were invited, largely off the record. Isaacman own words afterward, that the meeting "only reaffirmed my confidence", tell you the conclusion preceded the review and show a level of manipulative representation, that hint he will go far in the current administration.
The most qualified skeptic in the room, Charlie Camarda, a former NASA astronaut, heat shield research engineer, and member of the first shuttle crew to fly after Columbia, walked out unconvinced. He said NASA "definitely does not have the data to show that it's safe" and that the agency was using "the same flawed thinking and crude analysis tools, similar to Columbia, similar to Challenger." He wrote an open letter to Isaacman warning that this "exhibits the same patterns that preceded past catastrophes." He estimated 1-in-20 odds of disaster. Danny Olivas was a man on the payroll, Charlie Camarda no.
On Polaris Dawn you say Isaacman, did the same tests and reported results just like the spacesuit engineer. You are making my point for me. The spacesuit engineer was Sarah Gillis, a Lead Space Operations Engineer at SpaceX who spent 11 years training astronauts, including the NASA crews for Demo-2 and Crew-1. She was there because she helped build and develop what was being tested. Isaacman was there because he paid for the mission.
Following test procedures that SpaceX engineers wrote, on hardware SpaceX engineers designed, inside a spacecraft SpaceX engineers built, does not make you an engineer. It makes you a test subject with a checkbook. A patient in a clinical drug trial also "does the same tests and reports results" as the researchers but that does not qualify them to run the FDA.
Which brings us to the question you seem to have avoided.
Why was Isaacman selected as NASA Administrator? He is the CEO of Shift4 Payments, which has a five year global payment processing deal with SpaceX's Starlink.
He has no aerospace engineering background, no government management experience, no science credentials. During his confirmation hearing, when Senator Markey asked about his ties to Musk, Isaacman claimed they were not close :-)) and that he had not discussed his NASA plans with Musk...
But when Markey asked whether Musk was present at his interview with Trump, a simple yes or no question... Isaacman refused to answer.
A payments CEO with financial ties to SpaceX, nominated by a president who received hundreds of millions from Musk, who can't say whether Musk was in the room when he got the job... If you don't see the problem, you either are not looking or dont want to look.
Maybe its opportune to talk about editorial consistency, because your statement here is a fascinating case study in selective moral clarity.
When posts surface about Gaza, documented by the UN, by Médecins Sans Frontières, by the Lancet, by journalists who were subsequently killed while reporting or now in Lebanon, they vanish from the front page with remarkable efficiency...
The reasons, which I have collected like trading cards at this point, include: "too political," "not related to tech," "flamebait," "this isn't the forum for this," "not intellectually curious," and my personal favorite, "this will only generate heat, not light."
Entire hospital systems destroyed, aid workers killed in marked vehicles, tens of thousands of documented child casualties, and the curated editorial position is: not HN material.
A Molotov cocktail lands on a billionaire CEO's porch. No injuries. Likely a disturbed individual, and according to some well researched reporting in the New Yorker, Altman's personal life has generated no shortage of intense grievances that have nothing to do with AI or tech.
But here we are: front page, moderator editorial, existential crisis about the community's soul...!?
So help me understand the framework. Is violence HN worthy when it is directed upward on the org chart? Is a zero casualty arson attempt on a mansion more deserving of community reflection than systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure, because one involves someone in YC Rolodex?
You write that you've "never seen a thread this bad." I'd invite you to read the comments that appear in the eleven minutes before Gaza threads get flagged. They're remarkably similar in tone, just aimed at people who don't have Sam publicist.
You say you want to "find something else to do with your life." Maybe that instinct is worth listening to. Since the AI boom, HN moderation has drifted from "intellectually curious forum" toward something closer to "curated narrative for the industry it covers."
When a platform consistently decides that violence against tech executives is a moral emergency but violence enabled by tech companies' contracts is "off-topic," the person setting that editorial line is not a neutral steward, they're an editor with a viewpoint.
And that's fine, but let's not dress it up as community values. So...In the spirit of consistency:
I'd like to this post be flagged. It involves no technology. It's a criminal matter best left to law enforcement. The comment section is, by the moderator's own assessment, irredeemably toxic. It is generating heat, not light. It is too political. It is not intellectually curious. It will attract flamebait.
In other words...it meets every single criterion routinely applied to kill discussions about violence that does not happen on somebody porch in Pacific Heights.
> Is violence HN worthy when it is directed upward on the org chart?
Generally, world news and politics are not supposed to be submitted unless there's a tech industry connection. The exception seems to be world-changing news, and there's a light touch on YC-affiliated news for conflict of interest reasons.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
That's not really accurate in terms of how we moderate stories with political charge on HN. I've written about this many times: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... If you or anyone want to understand how we actually approach this, all the information is accessible through those links.
You seem to be making quite a few false assumptions about HN moderation—for example, that we left the current thread on the frontpage. In fact we downweighted it the same way we downweight other flamewars.
HN has had many major frontpage threads about Israel/Gaza. We haven't been suppressing the topic. I gather that you feel it should have more representation than it does, but that is a different issue; everyone feels that way about the topic they feel strongest about. Incidentally, the people on the opposite side from you believe that we're nefariously suppressing things in exactly the opposite direction, and direct their ire at us in much the same way that you have. (To put it crudely, we get hammered for antisemitism from one angle and genocide from another.)
You seem to be assuming that I'm not aware of what awful things people post in those threads. On the contrary, I'm sickeningly familiar with them and have banned many accounts for breaking the site guidelines there. If you know of a case that we missed—entirely possible, since we don't see everything—I'd like to see links. But you shouldn't assume that the moderators must be on the opposite side of an issue from you, or have no human feelings about it, when you happen to see something bad on HN. The likeliest explanation is simply that we haven't seen it yet.
There are many ways for a thread to be bad. You're right that people hurling tribal abuse at each other is one of those. However, even in the worst of those threads I don't usually see people justifying or celebrating specific violence against specific persons, and if I did see that, I would intervene. I think what shocked me in the current case was how the thread quickly turned into a mob dynamic with commenters vying to outdo each other, no doubt feeling that it is just fine to do that—indeed, righteous—because the object of the rage was $rich-ceo.
What I was saying is that a mob dynamic like that is not ok on HN even if the target is $rich-ceo. It's not "you can't do this on HN because the target is rich and powerful". It's "you can't do this on HN to anyone, even if they happen to be rich and powerful".
I gather that you won't believe me, since you've built an entire case on assuming the opposite. All I can tell you that it is a deep misunderstanding. I've intervened in many such threads many times, regardless of who it was that the commenters were celebrating harm to, or attempted harm.
As for the notion of treating one incident of failed violence as more important than mass slaughter of children, I agree with you that that would be grotesque.
"...In an interview with Israeli journalist, Dan Margalit in December 2012, Netanyahu told Margalit that it was important to keep Hamas strong, as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Netanyahu also added that having two strong rivals, this would lessen pressure on him to negotiate towards a Palestinian state..."
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