[wccrawford]

When a tragedy happens, you don't have to restrict all your thought to the injured people. You can use some of it for other things, like pointing out that Google could have been a good source of information about this event if they had kept their realtime search.

[mirkules]

I noticed that "Explosion in Oslo" article from the front page has been removed. My guess is because it isn't considered "hacker news" - a discussion we've had many times on this forum. So sadly, we have to resort to finding technical reasons to report major current events so they wouldn't be removed.

[wccrawford]

Or you could report them on sites that are for that kind of information. I applaud HN's determination to remain a site for hacker news, and not accept anything and everything that may affect a hacker in some way, shape or form.

[mirkules]

Like I said, we've had this discussion many times before on HN. The short of it is, I don't want HN to devolve into a"current events" type of site either, but without the now-deleted article "Blast in Oslo," I wouldn't even know something happened (because I wouldn't have checked the news sites otherwise).

I accept HN just won't be my one-stop solution for major news (I may not like it, but that's a different story). My comment was just a probable explanation as to why the headline sounded insensitive.

[mirkules]

On a related note (pardon me from replying to myself), as we should "...not accept anything and everything that may affect a hacker in some way, shape or form," I am strongly opposed to stories like "OS X Lion Released Today" or "Linux 3.0 released." In essence, these tidbits are just noise, worse than "current event" type stories because they are related to hackers, but really offer nothing interesting of value that we couldn't find on other sites (slashdot, techcrunch, et al). It is actually a news event disguised as an article.

More "Researchers develop tattoo that monitors glucose levels" and less "iOS 5 beta 4 is out," please!

[Udo]

Usually I would second that opinion. However, in this case I believe in the face of tragedy and/or very important events a community should disregard those restrictions and come together to exchange personal experiences and other information.

[jeremyarussell]

Well this is the hackers news website, if we want regular news on mundane stuff then we can go to msn yahoo google aol (hell twitter evidently) etc etc.

As far as it being insensitive, it's only like that if you feel everyone should mourn all the time for the thousands of tragic incidents that occur. Personally I would find life much less satisfying if I was busy being sad all the time.

And as for the article, it raises a highly valid point, google forsook a better system for one that isn't fully featured and as robust. I tend to think they did this so they can implement their own system, whether greed or control being the reason it stands to say that users will want the best, someone therefore should be pointing out stuff like this.