Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Evidence emerges of Israeli use of phosphorus weapons in Gaza

guardian.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 88 posts

Re: Evidence emerges of Israeli use of phosphorus weapons in Gaza

#41

Post by palish »

pg wrote: post #37
palish wrote: post #29

Okay, sorry, no. This story is ridiculously Reddit. "This sort of story is important; I don't care if we call this 'Hacker News' or not." pg once linked to a Reddit comment by a passionate Redditor who refused to follow the rules. The gist of the comment was, "I refuse to post this Ron Paul story to the Politics subreddit because I feel it's just too important ." And now here we are about a year later and Ron Paul hy…

I don't think this post is a violation of "the rules." HN is not supposed to be just about hacking, but about anything interesting to hackers-- anything interesting to the intellectually curious. There is not necessarily zero overlap between that and Reddit. E.g. Reddit users probably started posting earlier about the present recession, but when the matter became serious enough we started to have some stories about i…

Okay. Thank you for taking the time to convey your reasoning. It's valid, and you care a lot about the issues in Gaza. I'm just concerned that newer users may use this to justify their own bad behavior, but I suppose that can be dealt with.

Re: Evidence emerges of Israeli use of phosphorus weapons in Gaza

#42

Post by palish »

pg wrote: post #39
palish wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The story was explicitly brought back. You can upvote a dead story, but I'm not sure whether the submitter gains karma for that, and whether that causes the story to move higher up the front page. But the story will remain dead unless necromanced. This seems like a good time to share some thoughts about killing submissions. The troubling aspects of the current "dead submission" implementation are: - You can't comment…

Dantheman's account wasn't disabled for submitting that comment, but for reinserting editorial remarks in a submission title after I'd reverted it to the original. There's currently no way to lock story titles, so the only way to avoid an endless cycle of reverts was to disable his account for a few hours. I only replied to that comment because there was no other way of contacting him; he had no email addr in his pro…

Thank you for clarifying. I wonder if that's a symptom that a private messaging system would be useful for HN? But I'm really glad that dantheman learned from the experience instead of just leaving the site entirely, and I wonder if there's a way of making it obvious what happened so that other users could also be taught to avoid bad behavior.

But it probably doesn't matter much. Sorry for my possibly-inflammatory post; I'm fine with it being deleted if you'd like.

Re: Evidence emerges of Israeli use of phosphorus weapons in Gaza

#43

Post by davi »

pg wrote: post #37
palish wrote: post #29

Okay, sorry, no. This story is ridiculously Reddit. "This sort of story is important; I don't care if we call this 'Hacker News' or not." pg once linked to a Reddit comment by a passionate Redditor who refused to follow the rules. The gist of the comment was, "I refuse to post this Ron Paul story to the Politics subreddit because I feel it's just too important ." And now here we are about a year later and Ron Paul hy…

I don't think this post is a violation of "the rules." HN is not supposed to be just about hacking, but about anything interesting to hackers-- anything interesting to the intellectually curious. There is not necessarily zero overlap between that and Reddit. E.g. Reddit users probably started posting earlier about the present recession, but when the matter became serious enough we started to have some stories about i…

There's a difference between things that are interesting to the intellectually curious, and things that are interesting to hackers. This topic provides a good example.

The economony is a big, somewhat hackable system. We elect representatives to steer it and shape it. When a big, important system's performance starts to degrade, that attracts the attention of hackers.

The Israel/Gaza war is much less hackable seeming. Important, appalling events are occurring, but to my mind they are not hacker news.

It's a subjective call. This is your site, and of course you are entitled to decide what is Hacker News.

[edit] Politics and wars are also hackable, in some sense, so maybe this distinction is less crisp than one would like. But there does seem to be a difference between using this site to talk about economics, and using it to talk about conflicts between nations or political parties. In the case of entrenched conflicts, discussion is very unlikely to change anyone's model of how the world works. The thing I like about discussion here is reading it and participating in it supports the evolution and refinement of my model of how the world works.

Re: Evidence emerges of Israeli use of phosphorus weapons in Gaza

#45

Post by ntoshev »

pg wrote: post #37
palish wrote: post #29

Okay, sorry, no. This story is ridiculously Reddit. "This sort of story is important; I don't care if we call this 'Hacker News' or not." pg once linked to a Reddit comment by a passionate Redditor who refused to follow the rules. The gist of the comment was, "I refuse to post this Ron Paul story to the Politics subreddit because I feel it's just too important ." And now here we are about a year later and Ron Paul hy…

I don't think this post is a violation of "the rules." HN is not supposed to be just about hacking, but about anything interesting to hackers-- anything interesting to the intellectually curious. There is not necessarily zero overlap between that and Reddit. E.g. Reddit users probably started posting earlier about the present recession, but when the matter became serious enough we started to have some stories about i…

This is politics, and it is not even news. Israel has been accused of using such weapons a couple of years ago:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_phosphorus#2006_Israel-Le...

Clearly it is not more important now than it was then. I am all for a broad spectrum of topics covered here on HN, but this is just a controversial topic that is useless to discuss here.

Re: Evidence emerges of Israeli use of phosphorus weapons in Gaza

#46

Post by aswanson »

davidw wrote: post #12
pg wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes stories become big enough that they spill out of their ordinary stream. For example, there is a stream of news about Ebola fever that under normal circumstances is read mainly by infectious disease specialists. But if there is a really big Ebola outbreak somewhere, that starts to be relevant to everyone. What's happening in Gaza now seems pretty serious.

> What's happening in Gaza now seems pretty serious. Serious things have been happening in that part of the world for more than 2000 years, and will continue to happen long after we're all dead. I think they are given ample coverage on other sites, and there are plenty of other forums to discuss them on the internet. Or, put another way, say this site had some hawkish Israeli users and some Hamas-oriented Palistinian…

I share your fears on the flame war types this can attract, but we weathered a few hundred submissions on economics, libertarianism, etc ok, so maybe this area can be explored with rational, cogent dialogue.

Re: Evidence emerges of Israeli use of phosphorus weapons in Gaza

#47

Post by davi »

palish wrote: post #41
pg wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this post is a violation of "the rules." HN is not supposed to be just about hacking, but about anything interesting to hackers-- anything interesting to the intellectually curious. There is not necessarily zero overlap between that and Reddit. E.g. Reddit users probably started posting earlier about the present recession, but when the matter became serious enough we started to have some stories about i…

Okay. Thank you for taking the time to convey your reasoning. It's valid, and you care a lot about the issues in Gaza. I'm just concerned that newer users may use this to justify their own bad behavior, but I suppose that can be dealt with.

"... and you care a lot about the issues in Gaza."

I care a lot about certain political issues but I would not try to talk about them on HN, and I bet you wouldn't either.

It seems weird -- almost sycophantic -- to so readily apply a different standard to Paul Graham. The only way I think one can attempt to justify a different standard for him is by invoking the American (only?) expression, 'his house, his rules'. In this way of thinking, he built the site, and we are his guests. But even this seems like a pretty attenuated rationale, to me.

Re: Evidence emerges of Israeli use of phosphorus weapons in Gaza

#48

Post by chaostheory »

swombat wrote: post #23
Maktab wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was intended a constructive addition to the debate; whether it's constructive or destructive to this particular article's premise is neither here nor there. And I disagree with your interpretation of my post as a monologue, obviously. A monologue implies a one-sided stream of writing or speech to which any other views are given little to no opportunity to respond. Many blogs are an example of this sort of thing. B…

Over-analyzing smart-ass comments leads nowhere... I wasn't putting down your comment, I was putting down the equally smart-ass "look, there's useful discussion here" comment that was addressed directly to me.

"Sweet, let's start discussing whether white phosphorous could be a good basis for an online start-up."

O give me a break - so it's perfectly fine when you make a smart-ass comment, but there's something wrong when I do?

Fine, if this type of article elicits that much emotion from certain members of hacker news, then I'll try not to upmod / participate in the discussion in the future.

Personally since I can detach myself from, obj analyze & discuss controversial topics (rampant piracy, totalitarianism, torture, the conduction of 'reverse-genocide') regarding my country of origin; I just thought the overwhelming maj people here can do the same. I'm beginning to feel I'm somewhat wrong

Re: Evidence emerges of Israeli use of phosphorus weapons in Gaza

#49

Post by swombat »

chaostheory wrote: post #48
swombat wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over-analyzing smart-ass comments leads nowhere... I wasn't putting down your comment, I was putting down the equally smart-ass "look, there's useful discussion here" comment that was addressed directly to me.

"Sweet, let's start discussing whether white phosphorous could be a good basis for an online start-up." O give me a break - so it's perfectly fine when you make a smart-ass comment, but there's something wrong when I do? Fine, if this type of article elicits that much emotion from certain members of hacker news, then I'll try not to upmod / participate in the discussion in the future. Personally since I can detach my…

Of course there isn't. I love smart-ass comments, as you can see from my comment history.

Re: Evidence emerges of Israeli use of phosphorus weapons in Gaza

#50

Post by fauigerzigerk »

pg wrote: post #9
timcederman wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are lots of important stories in the world, and each has its place depending on the news stream.

Sometimes stories become big enough that they spill out of their ordinary stream. For example, there is a stream of news about Ebola fever that under normal circumstances is read mainly by infectious disease specialists. But if there is a really big Ebola outbreak somewhere, that starts to be relevant to everyone. What's happening in Gaza now seems pretty serious.

I agree that the Gaza events are very serious and deserve to spill out, but this article isn't particularly good. It's a rather low quality mainstream media article, quoting very biased sources without any mention about who these people are. It's not something that any specialist would read under normal circumstances.
Post reply on HN