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Comment by scoofy | Hacker News Reader

HN has been awkwardly silent on the ongoing conflict. I'll be curious to see where the discussion leads when the conflict starts escalating in the info/itsec areas. I read the Nicole Perlroth's book this year, and I'm not excited about this at all.

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Look at https://news.ycombinator.com/active. It’s been practically overflowing with Ukraine and Russia stories for days now, to the point it’s almost a bit of a chore to pick through them all and find discussion of anything else.

> HN has been awkwardly silent on the ongoing conflict

I hate to be the “you’re holding it wrong” guy, but...

Like most major, general-interest news, it doesn't make the front page or, if it does, it doesn't stay very long.

But if you check /newcomments, it's been a continuously active discussion. And an absolute majority of current stories on /new relate to the conflict in one way or another.

HN isn't “awkwardly silent” on the ongoing conflict.

Maybe they meant dang and/or other mods/admins have been silent? HN has been the only place I've been following for news on the war.

It's not my only news source given I work in politics/civics, but HN is what I use for understanding the way the conflict is impacting the Internet on a technical level and the discussions of tech politics. For example, the request to ICANN, discussions on whether or not to cut off Russians' ability to use foreign infrastructure, etc.

It's invaluable for helping me follow this one specific area.

Edit: Also, I would like to say that the idea that 'every place on the Internet has to address every major event' is not really great for anybody who works in a related area. Think of political issues taking over hobby subreddits: I'm literally a civics educator, it's not super fun for me to log in to talk about video games and get greeted with 'if you don't agree with VERY REDUCTIVE BASIC 101 POSITION/don't want to see discussion in these spaces, you're terrible.' I put in almost 40 hours a week and do more than you do, random (likely 16-20 year old) Reddit mod. I don't need your lectures, I need to see crazy ways to break video games.

Like no. It's just that it's like being a math teacher and logging in to see people sharing (often wrong) math test answers in your beer group. You need a break for your own mental health.

I'm starting to get really concerned for the overall mental health of the journalist class + political staffers. The ability to step away from the pressure cooker is integral to maintaining your stability.

Totally agree with this. My work and study involves a fair amount of statistics. Yesterday I got accidentally nerd sniped by some bad date based numerology which I promptly spent 20 minutes angrily demolishing. It would have been nice to not see numerology on my fb feed because I could have put that effort towards something more constructive.

I work in communications for a non-partisan civic/political non-evil organization (Think like the Congressional Research Service or parts of NARA, nothing sexy or cool) and my graduate focus was on filter bubbles/social media algorithms/information policy (back in 2015). I also do front-end/UI/UX work.

There have been multiple times when I've logged into my social media (or my regular media feeds) and felt nauseated. I can just see all the fingerprints everywhere, pushing us this way and that, and I have also seen the effect that it has had on my loved ones over the past 7 years. It's like everything now is covered with this disgusting, vampiric slime that prevents you from making genuine connections with others.

But I cannot move the ocean with a thimble.

From the HN guidelines:

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, 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."

It's not unusual for top breaking stories to get flagged off the HN front page, simply because they're top stories that are broadly covered in the mainstream media.

Now, niche responses to ongoing current events (like the InfoSec, supply chain, or technical aspects of the Ukraine invasion) are another matter, and I've seen several of them on the HN front page recently.

I think war is an interesting new phenomenon, similar to a pandemic. It's a black swan event that warrants discussion.

Discussion, sure. Discussion here, not necessarily.

Dunno if I’d call it a black swan event. Prediction markets like Metaculus were at 50% way before the invasion and 75% days before; Tho most of the pundits didn’t see it coming: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ukraine-warcasting?s=r

It’s unclear to me when and how exceptions are made to this policy, but there have been plenty of “world news” stories on Ukraine / Russia lately.

Here are a few I posted that made it to the front page:

* Russia's top bank quits Europe due to sanctions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30528503

* Russia Makes Calling Ukraine War an 'Invasion' a Criminal Offense: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30556430

* Russians are trying to flee – data from Google Trends: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30568557

* Russia to restrict Facebook access for 'censoring' its media: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30469237

I know there have been many others. You could also try searching for ‘Ukraine’: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ukraine or ‘Russia’: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=russia

This is probably a good thing. HN discussions about geopolitics are usually poor.

But I share your curiosity on the seeming lack of discussion, or on another level, organisation. I feel disturbed by Russia indiscriminately murdering people, and threatening the end of civilisation, all conducted with gleeful mendacity. They have also shut off a large proportion of global food supply which developing nations rely on. I feel I should be doing something about it, but I don’t know what to do.

But in the end, HN is just a bunch of people on the internet.

Are there any forums with high-quality geopolitics discussions, as HN is for tech?

didn't dig a lot but I peek at r/geopolitics (not great, not terrible)

OSINT on twitter yields some finer news

I'm asking people around for more serious chat groups but nothing comes up

reddit.com/r/geopolitics used to be good, now it went into terminal decline. There can not be a good geopolitics forum that scales it seems, sadly.

The silence isn't due to a lack of submissions or upvotes [1], but the articles usually get flagged off the front page relatively quickly.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=fa...

They often get flagged into oblivion after they become infested with flamebait. Guidelines preclude speculating as to the authenticity of the often-new accounts engaging in this, but authenticity is not the same as intentionality and polluting the comments is a well established way to get a story off the front page.

Wow, I actually hadn't noticed I could flag stories and even comments, I assumed it had the same points threshold as down voting (I say this as a relatively new account).

Feature, not bug.

I can see how one would want to know What The Other Nerds Think about any given topic in the global narrative but it truly is better this way

There were many posts which reached the front page about the war in Ukraine. Although I devoured them with interest, they are off-topic, therefore it’s good that HN doesn’t dwell on it. Other social media became single-topic about the war for a week, HN offers a reprieve by keeping IT and startups at the center.

I don't think it's awkward silence...there's just very little so far that meets HN's guidelines for on-topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It was on the frontpage the other day when Elon Musk gave UKR access to Starlink.

so for HN users is more important Elon Mask than ....

This. There's just not that much to say. There's nothing to debate; we're pretty much unanimously for peace and against aggression. There's nothing that we techies and entrepreneurs are going to do to make any difference, unless you're up at Elon Musk's scale. The only arguing is going to be politics (NATO response, appease Russia, etc) and that's exactly what HN tries to avoid.

At most we're involved in tangential economic affairs, like cutting off the payment infrastructure. Topics like that do seem to be getting about the right amount of attention here, a thread or two per day.

Multiple times I noticed a technique being used to push undesirable articles off the first page - you flag an article and then quickly unflag it (1-2 minutes). It will be bumped off the first page, but very few will notice the fleeting flagging.

It has already escalated a lot in terms of "cyberwar" or whatever people call it nowadays. Ukrainian infrastructure is under heavy attack from Russia and Russia is under heavy attack from volunteers from literally ever single country in the world, so heavy that Russia is now cutting off the rest of the internet because they can't handle the attacks.

According to Ukrainian TV US cybercommand in Europe is actively engaged in fighting Russian cyberattacks on Ukraine.

That sounds a bit fanciful because how do you "actively fight cyberattacks"? It's all attack and no defense - even the passive defense is attack (via red teaming).

why this choice of words ?

frankly the amount of noise and fog of war is still high.. whatever we say is of low importance and value

I have other sources that I read when I want general information about what is going on in the world.

HN is something that I read for a very specific subset of information.

I don't find this to be that strange.

Speaking for myself working in cybersecurity, I suspect a lot of corporate and government IT/InfoSec folks are too busy rolling out recommended mitigations and observability improvements to have too much to say. Mainstream media does a good job covering where our (InfoSec/IT) industry fails. A job done well you will likely never hear about.

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