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Ask HN: Urgent connection to Twitter support

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Re: Ask HN: Urgent connection to Twitter support

#31
post #23

I'm curious, is this service service equally available/relevant to civilians on both sides of the conflict, or only one? I don't ask to be judgmental, I recognize that politically/legally it may not even be possible to serve both sides. I just wondered if the automated nature of the service allows for it to be apolitical.

Unfortunately, it caters mostly to the Israeli side, as it is in Hebrew and relies on Hebrew sources of information. I would very much be interested in helping build a similar system for Palestinians in Gaza, but from past attempts to organize similar cooperations, help is not necessarily wanted. That being said, I am aware of several Palestinian users in Gaza who do follow this account for various purposes.

Respect the intent to make a tool for peace, not a weapon. Want to point out that "Various purposes" might include the people shooting the missiles seeing if/where they land? These communications might better be conducted via bulk PM?

Re: Ask HN: Urgent connection to Twitter support

#32

This is horrible. But you can be sure if the US were launching missles and a Twitter feed were used to warn the targets then the owner of the account would be an enemy of the state. War is horrible. The internet brings us all closer to it. But you are basically asking an American corporation to supply a war effort with ammunition to your side.

Again, I will not comment on the political aspect of this specific campaign. (Hit my feed to get a sense of my personal opinions if you are truly interested.)

I care about information dissemination and about helping humans on both side of a conflict to have better insight into the chaos that is occurring around them.

Re: Ask HN: Urgent connection to Twitter support

#33
post #23

I'm curious, is this service service equally available/relevant to civilians on both sides of the conflict, or only one? I don't ask to be judgmental, I recognize that politically/legally it may not even be possible to serve both sides. I just wondered if the automated nature of the service allows for it to be apolitical.

Unfortunately, it caters mostly to the Israeli side, as it is in Hebrew and relies on Hebrew sources of information. I would very much be interested in helping build a similar system for Palestinians in Gaza, but from past attempts to organize similar cooperations, help is not necessarily wanted. That being said, I am aware of several Palestinian users in Gaza who do follow this account for various purposes.

Thanks, I don't ask to be partisan, just to gain a better understanding of the situation. I hope the conflict dies down quickly and that there is less death and destruction for everyone to worry about.

Re: Ask HN: Urgent connection to Twitter support

#34
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, it caters mostly to the Israeli side, as it is in Hebrew and relies on Hebrew sources of information. I would very much be interested in helping build a similar system for Palestinians in Gaza, but from past attempts to organize similar cooperations, help is not necessarily wanted. That being said, I am aware of several Palestinian users in Gaza who do follow this account for various purposes.

Respect the intent to make a tool for peace, not a weapon. Want to point out that "Various purposes" might include the people shooting the missiles seeing if/where they land? These communications might better be conducted via bulk PM?

Possibly, but most reports never mention specific coordinates.

Israelis already have complete drone coverage of Gaza Strip, they don't need reports on hits. Palestinians cannot possibly use coordinates to aim homebrew rockets being used. Hit radius is e.g. around 1km for far range rockets.

Re: Ask HN: Urgent connection to Twitter support

#35
post #25

I understand the times are critical, and I apologize in advance for giving a suggestion at a bad time like this, but while @support answers you, why not check Faye[1] + HAProxy[2]? This may not be as convenient as Twitter, but in case the answer from Twitter is negative, you can use these tools to broadcast updates in real time (I assume at this point, scalability is already an issue, and this is why I added HAProxy…

Thanks for the suggestion! Twitter is being used since many users already have it setup including push notifications.

I would love to build a push system of my own (it's also right up my alley), but onboarding users to a proprietary system would be significantly harder.

Re: Ask HN: Urgent connection to Twitter support

#37

Maybe you should think about putting up an rss feed, or throttling yourself the information posted to kind of sum them up in the meantime

Good suggestion. An RSS feed sort of exists already, and twitter is just a better vehicle to deliver these alerts.

We could try to throttle ourselves, and better filter e.g. duplicates, that is true.

Re: Ask HN: Urgent connection to Twitter support

#38
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have zero connection to the area or the conflict, but I too want to follow the feed.

Go ahead, it's @rotternews but be warned it is very high traffic, might want to add it to a list rather than follow, as most of our users do.

Thanks for that!

Re: Ask HN: Urgent connection to Twitter support

#39

I'm curious, is this service service equally available/relevant to civilians on both sides of the conflict, or only one? I don't ask to be judgmental, I recognize that politically/legally it may not even be possible to serve both sides. I just wondered if the automated nature of the service allows for it to be apolitical.

Well the conflict itself is not apolitical.
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