I'm a late adopter of HN, but was a bit surprised to see nothing about Israel/Hamas on the home page. Is that sort of political stuff forbidden, or is there just no interest in this community?
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
The most recent fluctuations of the war between Israel and its neighbors that has been going on literally since Israel existed with lulls but rarely more than a few weeks without new armed attacks or human rights abuses directed by one side against the other (and with, on both sides, deliberate or indiscriminate targeting, and systematic collective punishment of civilians being more a norm than an exception, with the excuse that what the other side is doing justifies it, makes even events that feature these not novel phenomena even in the context of the specific conflict.)
The guideline criteria say not to submit flamebait, to submit things with interesting, novel intellectual discussion, and generally nothing that is on tv news.
I would imagine that the decades long Israeli/Palestinian conflict would violate all three.
Slightly offtopic, but it's interesting to read comments from that day knowing what we know now. Especially those stating that there will be no conventional war nor loss of life.
I'd add to this that I think that thread is why it's interesting to see/have these discussions on Hacker News. The "appropriate" places for these topics aren't especially interesting because they tend to be ideological echo chambers for one side or the other. That leads to trite and banal "discussion", if it can even be called that. Actually seeing 'real' people all across the spectrum of views, values, backgrounds, and so on is just so much more interesting.
> I'm a late adopter of HN, but was a bit surprised to see nothing about Israel/Hamas on the home page. Is that sort of political stuff forbidden, or is there just no interest in this community?
Because it isn't reddit. I'm sure this forum is full of Israeli but also Muslim devs, do you really want that kind of strife on HN? I don't. There is no way that kind of discussion will not devolved into a giant mess.
It's even not because it's controversial, there has been outrageous topics on this forum (from my perspective), but it's already discussed everywhere else, with the exact same predictable results...
There is no interest in showing Israel being attacked but there is plenty of political discussion such as daily flamewars about ancient misdeeds of US three letter agencies (but almost never discussions when these agencies shut down a botnet or do something positive).
These rules are either applied unfairly or the community is full of shills that make it appear that way.
To echo others, it’s against policy. Not that we don’t care (we do) but that it’s better covered (and serviced) elsewhere, this isn’t the forum for those kinds of discussions.
It’s a guaranteed unproductive flame war. The exact same flame war that’s been happening about as long as the Internet has existed. It’s really boring at this point.
JFC. Boring in the sense that exactly nothing new is going to be posted and anyone who’s seen a couple of these could write entire exchanges that will happen basically verbatim. The discussion is guaranteed to be 100% a repeat of all the other ones. So, boring.
I dunno, a thousand terrorists coordinating land, sea, and air (paraglider and drone) over WhatsApp with videographers posting professionally editing footage to Telegram in real-time is actually pretty interesting.
Funny we call them terrorists while hundreds of millions view them as freedom fighters trying to liberate their lands. I wonder if the East and the West are destined to just always collide. The staunch support by the western governments for their permanent-colony experiment in Palestine (ie Israel) is what leads to millions of Middle Easterners continually hating western governments.
Yes, because why wouldn’t you call the people killing innocent 20 year olds at a fucking rave freedom fighters? Or going in families homes and killing parents in front of their children? Or raping and murdering innocent women? Or kidnapping and mutilating women and children?
Idgaf what nationality people are. When they commit acts like these, they are _not_ fighting for freedom, and they are _not_ worthy of any kind of respect. If it’s Americans, Russians, Chinese, Germans, or Palestinians committing these atrocities, it is disgusting, and they are _terrorists_, and I really hope that there is swift and harsh retaliation against these horrible human rights violators.
The news may be interesting. No open-registration forum has generated an interesting thread about this topic since the very first such discussion that ever happened. It's basically one of those laws of the Internet.
You're right, and usually threads that do get up-voted are focused on specific technological novelties, whether in the title of the article or the content.
Just look at this story - the reasons it's considered "reasonable" for HN is because the framing is a technological story (internet traffic spike). That then also gives a small space for some people to discuss other aspects of this.
A land invasion bordering what is now the EU hasn’t happened in over half a century.
And most of the posts are technical discussions about the implications of the war, like Russia trying to get an airplane to fly out of a wheat field; not inane “X has progressed 200 meters” or whatnot.
In general, even if it's submitted, it's up to a bunch of clicks on the small arrows to keep it on the first page, and other submissions might win instead.
Even if there was a "it must be about hardware or software" rule, that wouldn't be such a bad thing, otherwise we'd just end up getting another reddit.
Anything that can lead to flame wars is frowned upon and gets pruned in a number of ways. Political topics tend not to lead to useful, sober discussions.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
The most recent fluctuations of the war between Israel and its neighbors that has been going on literally since Israel existed with lulls but rarely more than a few weeks without new armed attacks or human rights abuses directed by one side against the other (and with, on both sides, deliberate or indiscriminate targeting, and systematic collective punishment of civilians being more a norm than an exception, with the excuse that what the other side is doing justifies it, makes even events that feature these not novel phenomena even in the context of the specific conflict.)