Amazing how far this is from all the early speculation. Also incredibly sad.
To be fair,
>Detectives believe that the killer, dressed in a black three-piece suit, wearing a black mask and carrying a duffel bag
The professional coordinated murderers of Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh were caught on surveillance cameras wearing totally unremarkable clothing. In real life, contract killers don't have uniforms. However I think it's interesting to consider the possibility that the killer in this case was essentially role-playing as a contract killer as portrayed by popular media.
What's intriguing to me is the idea that not only might the killer have been (consciously or unconsciously) role-playing a "professional", but that the police were engaging in the same fantasy.
There were under 200 homicides in NYC in 2020 (to date). Undoubtedly the slimmest minority (if any) were, in the way one imagines, "professional". So it seems safe to assume the homicide detectives might not have significant firsthand experience with which to say, "this seems like a professional job."
I'm reminded a little bit of the Bellagio "Biker Bandit" (https://lasvegassun.com/news/2011/aug/23/bellagio-bandit-get... whole thing seemed super professional (full-face motorcycle helmet, full body-suit, in-and-out in minutes)...but it turned out to be a dude with a gambling problem and an Oxy habit.
> Initially, Dubai authorities believed al-Mabhouh had died of natural causes.[44] Fawzi Benomran, the Dubai police coroner, said, "It was meant to look like death from natural causes during sleep." It took 10 days for the Dubai police to come to the conclusion that al-Mabhouh was assassinated. Benomran described the determination of the exact cause of death as "one of the most challenging cases" his department faced.[45]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Mahmoud_Al-Ma...
The team that killed him were on camera entering the country and in the hotel. However if they had been successful in convincing local authorities the death was natural, that would have made the (presumably very difficult to avoid) video evidence effectively irrelevant because nobody would have thought to consider it relevant.
I mean these guys are pros, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Sergei_and_Yulia_...
And I always return to this story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillehammer_affair. If you can't count on the Mossad to have good opsec, who can you count on?
If anything, the impression that professionals do the job spotlessly seems like it goes hand-in-hand with the misattribution of this crime to a "professional."
From what's in the public record, even "professional" hitmen have their moments of conscience, laziness, procedural failures--and, apparently, quite frequently, presumably due to the moral pressure of conducting assassinations.
(Of course it's possible we don't hear about the hitmen who are truly pro-level, but I find that hard to believe.)
In this case, it was a $2.25 million condo. A suit and tie may be unremarkable clothing in that area.
Also, if Fahim was a jeans and t-shirt kind of guy like the numerous pictures of him suggest he may have been, the assistant may have normally been around the building in casual attire normally as well. A suit could have been out of character attire to mask his ID further.
I do think a lot of it comes down to one's tolerance for internet n00bs, popularity by upvotes rather than personal connection, an respect for influencers -- whether in the intellectual, professional, or stylistic realm.
Different strokes, I guess.
For me the fire hose of trending topics was too much, even with the occasionally fantastic post among them. So I rarely go there.
Then there are the really large communities covering subjects that interest me. I do subscribe to them but rarely interact because it's still a fire hose - responses to comments are really sensitive to the time of day and since I'm at least half to a full day off the timezone of the average community member, trying to interact is futile.
Then there are the smaller communities, usually tech for me. There is no longer that fire hose, and individuals are genuinely interested in learning something new, or sharing something new, often created by them. Add a number of this type of community and your daily feed becomes transformative.
And when you are looking to solve a problem, particularly one in an area you are not an expert in, it’s just so good. Niche subs have a wealth of information, help and offers of direct messaging to help solve problems. When you hit a helpful sub it’s infectious too, and you find yourself passing on the support you received when you see someone struggling.
I used to live in Stack Overflow for help, but the closed and shut down questions just kills things. ‘Duplicate of...,’ ‘Off-topic,’ ‘Needs details or clarity,’ ‘Needs more focus,’ or ‘Opinion-based‘. I wasn’t even postings, as I was sure that the septic tone would become focused on me.
I wish the HN guideline was “there’s no upside for anyone mentioning Reddit from an often glass house” instead of specifically calling out comparisons of this site to that one. When this forum dumps on Reddit, it walks away with an impression of superiority that could not be further from the truth. Observe my sibling. All forums have their problems and HN is not blessed with immunity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23847195 is the main overall thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23848397 is another including smug necros, and there are many others.
At the same time, I would rather HN have a false sense of superiority that sometimes keeps it from descending to the depths as people at least make the attempt sometimes to keep it better than that, rather than just accept that it's often no different, and thus excuse that behavior when it happens.
That is, having the perception of superiority is helpful in as much as it allows comments like yours to have weight. Your comment on Reddit might be met with "well, duh, it's Reddit." Hopefully here some people are instead thinking about what they want this forum to be and whether they helped or hindered that. That's a bit pretentious of me to say, but I also think it's true.
> When this forum dumps on Reddit, it walks away with an
> impression of superiority that could not be further
> from the truth.
Indeed. Because the cost of the deceased's apartment was mentioned, folks started grasping at straws, some assuming it's a politically motivated (with a vague implication that this may have been class warfare) killing.
And this site is way better than Reddit. In terms of maturity, intelligence, site rules, etc.
Though I don't really get what you seem to be upset about regarding the armchair detective work. The cops led with the same general theory. The victim actually _was_ american (correct me if I'm wrong here) but he did business in foreign countries.
* Downvoting is not available for everyone.
* No sub forums, so no fragmentation.
* Less known than Reddit meaning fewer trolls.
* No UI makeover :)
* Great admins.
I mean everyone in the crypto space probably knows or at least knows of someone who has been cut up and dismembered, so it's not really that crazy. A lot of people here are founders, so that's the kind of thing we naturally worry about. I.e. you can probably get a better valuation if you skip the middlemen and go straight to family offices, especially ones in foreign countries, but then again if you take money from Ron Conway and things go sideways he's probably not going to send people to kill you.
If it's a problem people would have moved to a better example, not a years old case.
OSINT is a thing. It's also pretty amazing.
It is something HN can't do though. Smart people let conspiracies rise to the top and fear making a mistake by correcting them.
The Reddit/Boston Marathon meme is a gate-keeping meme on OSINT. Don't lynch mob ever, but also don't fear intelligent speculation.
Occam's razor certainly applied here. I wonder if that rampant speculation earlier shows how disconnected we are from reality. Our minds are certainly warped by the sugary fictions and media we consume.
I wondered about that quote.
What are the odds a given law enforcement offical would ever even see / know the results of a "professional"?
The few "professional" folks I can think of historically, usually also dispose of the body...
Ya try to do someone a favor... maybe not for someone why stole 10s of thousands of dollars from you?
What HN certainly is, demographically, is majority Western. What you're seeing on China-related topics is the growing rift between China and the West, the same trend that shows up in Western media and no doubt Chinese media as well. I spend a lot of moderation time and energy arguing for understanding about this. But there's no way we can expect HN to be immune from macro social and geopolitical trends.
There's no reason to believe that "HN is incredibly xenophobic" except insofar as human beings in general may be.
> a lot of the American userbase on HN are not "well off"
Oh come on, get serious. This is a board focused on Tech, an industry where our the median/mean is well above almost any other field in the US.
HN is more varied than you're assuming. That is actually the leading problem facing the community. People develop a distorted image of what the HN community is, and then when they encounter posts that contradict their image, they resort to antagonistic explanations that are harmful.
The actual dynamic is this: many people here have wildly different backgrounds, and therefore strongly different views, than your own (I don't mean you personally, but all of us)—views which they come by as honestly as the rest of us come by ours. Yes there are bad actors, but users grossly overestimate the significance of that. We're far too quick to consign each other to the bad actor bucket, because we underestimate the variety and size of the genuine differences between us.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I'm not consigning anyone to the "bad actor" bucket, but when we talk about filter bubbles we should at least be honest about the composition of groups and what traits they might have. There's no reason to think that the average HN user is representative of the average individual given the content.
Beyond that, due to the upvote system, the majority is amplified, so even if there are millions in poverty on this site, their views are going to be pushed lower than the tens of millions not in poverty. This is a bigger problem than HN obviously, but it does nobody any good to deny it's existence. The same could be applied to any minority group, whether its gender, sexuality, or race for that matter. This is a consequence of the system and you see the same thing on various subreddits (the fact that they split things into smaller boards mean there are communities where the site minority might be able to actually have a larger voice than the majority)
Edit: I was replying to the first version of your comment. I do disagree with the part you added later about upvotes. I think it is overinterpretation of the sort that feels-like-it-must-be-true, or feels-like-it's-probably-true. If there's one thing I've learned from moderating HN it's that those perceptions are extremely in the eye of the beholder and need to be bracketed if one wants to assess anything objectively.
p.s. Just to avoid misunderstanding, your account is still banned because you've continued to break HN's rules since we originally banned you. I restored your comments in this thread in order to reply to them. Users can also do that by vouching for good posts which shouldn't be [dead] (this is described at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch).
While he said what he said and you refuted, I think the thought behind what he said was influenced by the rise in anti-Chinese xenophobia of late, and to my mind that is a real phenomenon both on HN and off of it. It is accompanied by, it must be said, a sharp increase in xenophobia in China as well.
I "agree" with the general xenophobia, meaning the lack of progress and backsliding toward China aligning with western democratic and individualistic ideals that I hold dear is very disappointing, but I can also see that indulging in one's xenophobic feelings might not lead to a desired outcome either.
I just say that because, counter to your last statement, there is reason to believe that HN has become incredibly xenophobic (compared to where it was a few years ago), which similar to what you also said, is accompanied by a qualifier.
And that's likely the case so in a way the GP was right. HN is rapidly approaching being large enough to represent a fair cross section of the communities it is active in, with the note that it skews wealthy, educated and tech oriented. Whether that slice of the population is more or less xenophobic as a rule is an open question. I fear for the answer.
Disliking the actions of the CCP doesn’t mean people are xenophobic any more than disliking Trump makes someone anti-American.
Compared to what? China?
Topics such as BLM often involve whataboutism with many complaining about the lack of support for Hong Kong by supporters of BLM, see Senator Hawley's comments.
This is part of the coordinated anti-globalism, nationalist movement that Bannon and his cronies are promoting.
I am not convinced that they actually care about Hong Kong or the Uihgurs given how opposed they were to helping out the Syrian migrants.
China is doing some bad shit, but it's hard for me to judge them much more severely than any number of other countries.
https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/national-media-release/cbp-deta...
https://china.usembassy-china.org.cn/health-alert-u-s-consul...
What I don't support is when people use China as a tool to discredit movements like BLM because supporters aren't more broadly speaking out on injustices in other countries.
Bannon is strongly supportive of Russia even though the situation there is just as grim, see Chechnea, the loss of human rights for gays, and a Putin dictatorship of the country.
It's hard not to conclude that these criticisms are because China is a global economic power and a communist country.
It absolutely was due to his work in Nigeria.