It's fun to read through this history, while I'm listening to "Where Wizards Stay Up Late".

In reading through the thread [1], I noticed Marc and Jim Davis used an example audio file from the NSA that no longer exists: http://nsa.gov/pub/sounds/gorby.au

Anyone know what the story behind that was? Was that a common example?

[1] http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0196.ht...

Interesting catch!

From the filename and context, I'm going to guess it had something to do with Mikhail Gorbachev?

Searching for that filename yields almost exclusively links to that conversation.

Wayback machine didn't have anything for that URL but they did have a snapshot of the splash page for the NSA website circa 1998: https://web.archive.org/web/20051104005542/http://www.nsa.go...

Archive.org is truly a treasure.

> “We turned the company upside down,” Cook said. “Email searches, data center records, financial records, shipment records. We really forensically whipped through the company to dig very deep and each time we came back to the same conclusion: This did not happen. There’s no truth to this.”

Wow, ok then..

> follows it with his finger through the air as it took forever to land on the ground.

Sounds interesting, but I'm confused. So is he walking in front of it, and the flame is pulled toward his finger? Did it travel the farthest that way?

No, apologies. He burnt the paper and then picked one of the ashes as his "plane"

His finger never touched the plane after it took "flight" just pointed to it from the side so that everyone could follow the "flight path."

Some classmates were upset, I was just impressed.

Ah, I'm guessing time aloft was the metric?

"Time of flight" only the definition of flight was something like unpowered and untethered off the ground. So floating slowly to the ground becomes "flight" by the definition of the rules.

Wouldn't the burning of the paper technically make it powered?

No, the burning of the paper removed a great of mass from the paper turning to to a brittle paper ash. After the fire was out is when the timer started, since the paper ash was so much lighter but the same volume its buoyancy in air was drastically increased causing it to "float."

The up draft from the flame wasn't utilized to power the flight, the fire was only used transform the original rolling paper into a "plane" by mass reduction through combustion.

Dupe. Recent conversation : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18231961

> One aircraft was being pursued over Homestead, Florida in 1994, so ditched its cargo. A 34-kilogram bag of cocaine fell directly into a back yard where chief of police Curt Ivy was chatting with the Neighborhood Crime Watch about what to look out for in their quiet community.

Well that is ironic.

> (and getting worse in some important areas of employee happiness)

Would you mind elaborating?

This received 23 points in 30 minutes, and yet it is no longer on the front-page? Compare that to this [1], which has received 23 points in 4 hours, and is still on the front page. Are some folks flagging this into oblivion?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18095356

Yeah its odd - it doesn't seem to be a post that should be dropped.

I've emailed the HN mods to ask if they have any insight. Maybe it hit some sort of algorithm to prevent spammy posts.

too much velocity. probably artificial upvotes. also trying to make HN into a personal army to do achieve a goal doesn't sit well with mods. just report on news.

Maybe thats it. I've taken "protest here" off the title.

Yes, most of the upvotes were dropped by the software for being inorganic, but it was user flags that did it in (moderators didn't see it until now).

Edit: we've updated the title and turned off some of the flags.

What does inorganic upvotes mean?

I'm the original poster but I sure as heck didn't do anything to artificially upvote it. I didn't upvote it at all.

It's the software that tries to catch promotional votes a.k.a. voting rings. It does sometimes get things wrong, which is probably what happened here.

As sctb said, though, it's user flags that affected the post's rank the most. Perhaps the editorialized title had something to do with that (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18097611), and/or perhaps there is just fatigue with this class of submissions. People come to HN for unpredictable things, so whenever something starts to get predictable, they get ornery.

I work remote, and generally put in extra work while others are commuting, and this actually helps me collaborate with folks in other time zones. I'm happy to trade my extra labor for the benefit of not being stuck in traffic in a toll road. In addition to saving on fuel, tolls, and car depreciation, I haven't been rear-ended in years. Back when I drove more frequently, my car had several rear-end collisions.

This seems more like a Sainsbury's/DPD failure.

Up until apple makes up a story about 'investigating' as if the package was stolen

In 2025: Google decides to focus only on Search, Maps, and Mail; shuts down or divests all 243 other "side projects".

Including Angular 57.