https://archive.md/ayoEv
I wonder what HN's view is on the recent nazi salute of Elon ? All the relevant threads seem to become flagged very quickly. I think it would be a very interesting discussion, especially here.
I wonder what HN's view is on the recent nazi salute of Elon ? All the relevant threads seem to become flagged very quickly. I think it would be a very interesting discussion, especially here.
Sure, memes and one liners do not do well on Hacker News, but on the other hand, most "hackers" believe they are smarter and with better opinions than anybody else, which is often just a severe case of Dunning-Kruger. And the population of this site post Reddit fiasco is no different than Reddit anyway; how many Eternal Septembers have we gone through?
Your account has been created pre-COVID, so you must have witnessed that some topics should just be avoided for the sake of anybody's sanity, whether it's on HN or not.
In general, up/down vote systems just create echo chambers, not interesting and nuanced discussions.
I might be the stereotypical old man yelling at clouds, but I miss when this place was about startups, programming and Wozniak-tier hackers, not an Ars Technica with a Bay Area accent that attracts anybody calling themselves a "techie" to discuss the daily news.
300+ comments here for your entertainment
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42772995
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42773778
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42774621
I'm not sure it was that interesting though. This I found kind of interesting: Apparently his mum's parents were Hitler supporters and moved to South Africa from Canada as it was too liberal. Musk's dad talking about it: https://youtu.be/B6e1ES4MLD0?t=200
From the community guidelines:
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
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
In my (non American) point of view this transcends left vs right arguments, but this is exactly why I am curious what this community would have to say. It is an interesting topic, if only from an anthropological perspective.
Not a dumb question IMHO, but a hard one to answer. The closest thing to a 1930s-era HN might have been the classrooms and labs at places like Gottingen and Leipzig, where the 'hackers' of the day were watching the politicization of their profession nervously.
At some point it would have been too late for our counterparts with Jewish ethnicity to ask whether Ferdinand Porsche gave a Nazi salute or whether Wernher von Braun was giving speeches at Goering's favorite beer hall. They were too busy struggling with questions like, "When do I have to leave, where can I afford to take my family, and who will take us in?", bearing in mind that even the United States imposed ethnic quotas on Jewish immigrants at the time.
Those questions are the ones that crop up later, after polite society fails to pay enough attention to the earlier ones. The smart 'hackers' might have suspected what was coming, but it's always too soon to speak up, isn't it?
I just started reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich to get a better handle on the history of things. I read a book on Mussolini last year to try to gain some perspective. They both seemed to have risen to power through flaws in those countries' democracy, which is slightly terrifying watching the USA, as it definitely has flaws. However, I am unsure if the flaws I can see are big enough to allow for a "soft coup" at some point (and I am not an expert on what can be abused).
So you don't turn into Russia: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/how-has-state-owned-media-in-russ...
Authoritarian regimes rely on disengagement and nihilism to remain in power.
Him being a nutty rightwinger doing nazi salutes should put at least some off.
I've heard so many people kinda denying to themself what Musk is. Like some sort of cope.
Musk performing fascist salutes at a political rally is an interesting new phenomenon: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/20/trump-elo...
Like it or not, this is what's happening to the tech industry. So much of the tech sector is now precisely about politics and power.
You can't run away from it. You can't ignore it. And, if you're in the tech industry, you're responsible for it.
It's always best to see things as they are.