Comment by shell0x
7 days ago
I think the middle eastern conflicts are a tragedy. That said, this story does not belong on HN. As others called out this is a tech community and while there is sometimes an overlap with politics, it should at least be somewhat related like mass surveillance or AI being used for war.
HN is one of the most informative and least toxic communities and I’d appreciate if it would stay this way.
At the same time, there must be a point where general humanity overrides community guidelines.
Why? Everyone has alternative news sources where they can find such stories, and there’s nothing new here. There’s always some tragedy that you could argue deserves more attention, I don’t think we should hold our guidelines hostage to pleas for the heart.
> I don’t think we should hold our guidelines hostage to pleas for the heart.
I don't think that's an accurate framing of the situation. It's a single post that enough people decided was worthy of being upvoted to the front page. I think allowing the community to decide is far more inline with the spirit of hacker news than the outright banning a category of posts.
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Why does Gaza get 10x the coverage on HN and other social media well, when what has been happening in Sudan in the same time period is 10x worse?
(The 10x coverage number is from algolia hn search, the 10x worse number is from reported killings in the past year)
Because there is often a large tech component to it. The United States and Israel have two of the most advanced high-tech sectors in the world and they are playing a large role in this conflict.
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Because there are people who disagree about it. That's it. Everyone on HN who has an opinion on Sudan, agrees about it. Something that everyone agrees above does not get coverage.
Because Sudan isn't a tech/investment hub, and there's no overlap betweent he US and Sudanese defense industries.
The atrocities in Gaza are funded by, and sometimes even committed by, Americans. That’s why a predominantly American forum is interested in it.
That's a legitimate question and it has no good answer. Not just Sudan. There is an ongoing genocide in Myanmar, against the Rohingya. There is an ongoing genocide against the Uyghurs in china. None of those get nearly the amount of coverage the genocide in Gaza gets, or, now the war in Iran and Lebanon.
I have no idea why. I have recently started to grow a bit paranoid and wonder whether I am being manipulated by the media I consume. That would not be a huge surprise, I'm willing to bet most people are influenced by some of the things they read online.
Anyway this is an interesting question that has to be answered: why only Gaza, and not the other genocides?
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Because the west (our political and economic system) supports this war, and does so much more loudly than the war in Sudan,which is funded by the UAE, also a US ally, but a far less visible and consequential one. Nobody is visible working the media or politicians to win people over for the UAE every day, unlike Israel.
The aggressor in the Gaza genocide is also pulling the rest of the west into new wars in the region. The war is also deeply connected with our defense and tech industries.
There is plenty of reason to discuss this war.
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HN routinely talks about politics. Thinking that technology and politics can be understood in isolation is a pipe dream
> it should at least be somewhat related like mass surveillance or AI being used for war
Sure. Let's spin the story on developments in laser-guided sniper rifle accuracy:
> Suddenly, the boys said, they saw laser pointers shining on their family from every direction, heard their mother scream, heard their father say “God is great” — and then heard a deafening fusillade of gunfire.
The tech community props up these regimes by continuing to serve their tech needs. Everything is political in this day.
Toxic is saying politics needs to be kept separate. If we can't discuss how tech is literally fueling genocide, enslavement, and exploitation of people, then all other discussions tacitly serve those functions.
I disagree with this. The tech bros building these dystopian systems for big paychecks need to be informed somehow, this is the best way to reach them. They do care what their peers think of them and if we can reach their conscious in between bouts of agentic blogs and vibe coded hopes and dreams, then that is what we should do.
> and least toxic communities
Your comment sounds toxic to me. It endorses silence in face of a genocide.
We discussed a lot other wars here without immediate technological or economic consequences: Ukraine, Iraq, etc.
Why not the genocide in Gaza & West Bank?
[flagged]
Exactly! Don't bring politics into HN. Everyone and their dog have grievances. There's a time and place for them.
Exactly, we shouldn’t waste the precious time of HNers so that they can instead… checks notes… read about the nth vibevcoded side project!
Yes. I would much rather do that. This stuff is all over all of the other information sources. What is wrong with having HN purely tech focused? Politics with way more of a direct intersection with tech - for example the E2EE "bans", chat control, meta's misadventures - makes sense. But not unrelated crap.
Nobody is "raising awareness" here (saw this mentioned above in this thread). Trust me people will still hear about these things if HN doesn't post them. We're just sharing a BBC article for heaven's sake. Its not like we have some new information source like say a former-IDF tech founder whistleblowing. Its all so performative.
There is zero new information any HN reader gains from this post. Its a BBC article, the comments are the same as what you see on instagram twitter or reddit, and the responses from the "defenders" are the same as what you see on instagram twitter or reddit as well.
I've commented before[1] about the weird lack of moderation/enforcement of this guideline:
> 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.
This one is politics or crime depending on which side you're on.
Never seen it enforced. Not for gaza,iran,venezuela,pakistan,ukraine. The US elections, random nonsense trump does, US govt shutdowns, greenland too.
All of those have been covered here extensively with zero net benefit/net information transacted.
I'm not saying we should only talk about Flash Attention version 6546272. Like if you see the health insurance thread on the front page today, you can see a CFO, a tech worker in the space, etc, commenting and contributing net new information. This simply doesn't (and I don't see how it can ever) happen on these gaza threads.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45435109
I come here to escape these reddit style cesspools.. hacker news is literally for tech news and nth vibecoding side projects