Replit founder Amjad Masad isn’t afraid of Silicon Valley
sfstandard.com
sfstandard.com
> “You should compete,” I suggested.
> He smirked. “I always compete.”
Feels like a vocal jerk-off. Just tell me the details, idc how tuff the interview was.
This is fantasy fiction for VCs, founders, AI bros, and anyone else who isn't actually looking for information.
B: Oh noes, it can't be, they have specific policy against that!
A: That policy actually does not have anything about this.
B: Ah, that's because they are so ethical that they didn't even think to mention this in their policy!
Sure, this sounds extremely convincing.
(and of course, nobody ever ignored or tiptoed around a written policy, ever)
For Replit it's a good way to raise the profile of their founder, important for this phase of the company.
The SF Standard get an interesting profile out if this because Masad is an unconventional shape of founder. The Palestinian angle is a great hook to build a story around, especially right now. The Standard's editorial brand involves presenting tech stories from their own unique angle which makes this a good fit for them.
This is their best performing story on HN in a long time, so it clearly resonated with an audience that they presumably want to reach: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=sfstandard.com
I mean I get it. Who doesn't have an AI code generation tool now? It's like having a website in the first dotcom boom era (yes, Gandalf, I was there). No pop, no buzz, not hot and juicy enough. But add a little of intifada there, a fight against some murky forces of darkness (that throw hundreds of millions of vc money at the intrepid hero) - and maybe you got something. That's how journalism is done.
I find it pretty distracting too.
- i mean yes u cannot make money out of teenagers but damn replit's Vibe coding tool is fucking good. Better than Lovable or Bolt any day.
just to give u a perspective from a 20year old kid from a 3rd world county
I don't get all these vibe coding tools when Claude is better than any of them
No need to think about how/where to deploy, cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), etc. Just vibe and deploy.
(He did end up moving off the platform once he had enough validation)
The percentage of programmers with side projects they deploy themselves is very small. I’d guess less than 10% have a side project deployed somewhere. (And these days
Most experienced programmers in my circles have evening/weekend projects. We are notorious for hoarding unused domains for the "brilliant side project" that gets a burst of commits right after domain-renewal time
For personal projects, usually Firebase (+ occasional Cloud Run mixed in) which makes it relatively easy.
For professional projects, it's pretty easy now on AWS with their (unfortunately named) Copilot CLI [0] (highly, highly recommended).
But mostly, I keep my infra simple and bias towards modular monoliths [1] which ends up being the majority of my infra work (container packaging and deployment of the initial runtime infra).
[0] https://aws.github.io/copilot-cli/
[1] https://chrlschn.dev/blog/2024/01/a-practical-guide-to-modul...
Both make it pretty dead simple to deploy. AWS Copilot being the "more powerful" of the two, but still dead simple to use compared to CDK, Cloud Formation, or writing Terraform or Pulumi scripts.
I don't have to worry about cloud providers ruining my life with updates, free cloudflare in front so I get caching.
It's not too bad but there is an initial investment
I'm really curious what this looks like in practice? Like can you just download the whole codebase, throw it against a Supabase Postgres DB, and you're off running? What about any backing services or microservices? Is it tied to any thing like lambdas etc.
replit has made it like, even a 11 year old can make something out of thin air and acutally publish it to get a link to share
Not sure why this is controversial. I know it’s an issue with Cursor as they have to limit availability of models based on region. OpenAI specifically blocks India and Pakistan for example, among a long list of other countries.
Could u share a link or something?
P.s. found nothing on a google search
But us older guys (i'm not that old, 34, but still) can easily forget how valuable and exciting it is to have tools that make the publication / deploy easy. It's cool to hear what the younger, less experienced crowd gravitates towards in the modern dev tool landscape. Thanks for sharing!
Are their customers making money?
Will they be able to build retention?
I've got this question of every platform like this - Lovable, etc.
Cursor and IDE tools and models cater to a smaller audience, but they're sticky, repeat customers, big spenders.
How is that pragmatic? If you want to do good things, build a business and donate money or whatever. Getting into Twitter wars with internet strangers and spending on PR to tell everyone what you think about geopolitics strikes me as anything but pragmatic.
Plus social media is a uniquely deranging technology. Persona on twitter is rarely who the person is in real life.
As a powerful figure, you become a literal puppet in front of the public. Your opinions don't matter
1. A subjective amount that depends entirely on the lifestyle, burn rate and life expectancy.
Yep. Seems like he posts a bit more thoughtfully with deliberation ever since the "suing my intern over a weekend project" debacle.
Having other close friends from Jordan, it's not surprising that he's outspoken on the topic of Israeli occupation - it's very difficult to spend a significant amount of time in the affected regions and not come away with a very strong opinion.
I do wonder how sustainable it is as a business though. I expect Replit is sending the majority of that money to the big AI labs through API costs
As soon as anything becomes serious you're going to try and take it off Replit and use something like Claude Code and AWS etc
Running an IDE in a browser like that is not something I'd ever want to work with long time or experimenting on my "own" computer - maybe it's just me being weird but running the code on the metal I'm holding is much more satisfying.
I'm not sure what features / tools replit had in this regard, but I could easily see it dominating CS education and conferences as the go-to IDE. (then making the real money by monetising the students in the future, i.e. other tools you can sell - even something like replit as a cloud provider), by having features like
- templates you could share (i.e. one per lesson)
- live sessions (where the professor could log into many students replit instance and demonstrate)
- videos built into the editor / streaming / conferencing
- "homework had-in" features, automated test sharing, etc.I think that it had a big potential for that.
Seems to have worked out for them, mind!
Unfortunately their tooling locks me out from doing that and I wouldn't get help from their team after asking twice and getting moved to several different support members of their team. They just ghosted me and so I left and took my business elsewhere. Doesn't seem like it was made for advanced users.
Unfortunate.
I have it originated from a master prompt project I have architected with shadcn suggestions and how I like my app router setup.
I'm hooking this up to comet to be fully agentic with Linear tasks and human-in-the-loop approvals with up to 5 UI versions per feature. And ts contract request/responses for my nextJS api endpoints.
I also host a "LangChain" similar like tool in Azure C# minimal API in a shared replit secret. It's so nice to be able to re-use secrets for Radar, etc across all my apps.
“Terrorist sympathizer” and “successful businessperson” (or “rich person”) are completely orthogonal. Building a successful business does not necessarily change your terrorist sympathisation status. You can be a rich terrorist sympathiser.
feels like sophistry
the article connects the two, so they are not orthonogonal either:
> But even as things got noisy in public, Masad met eerie silence professionally. “My calendar was suddenly empty, because I was talking about Palestine,” he said. “Replit was not a hot company anymore. We did a layoff. And at the same time, a lot of my friends were no longer my friends. I was no longer invited to parties.”
> Potential partnerships dried up. Masad became a frequent topic in pro-Israel tech groupchats, a source said, where some investors accused him of being antisemitic.
> A Replit investor who requested anonymity to speak candidly told me Masad’s public persona has been “really challenging,” and he’s had to defend the founder in investor circles. I asked if Masad had lost business because of his views. “I’m sure the answer is yes,” the investor said.
It also fitted with some @paulg twitter stuff. He wrote a fair bit about both Gaza and Replit.
TIL. Big fair-play to him, and I'm very sincere about it, he must of have left a lot of potential money on the table from possible investors as a result of his view on the genocide in Gaza. Again, fair play to him, we need a lot more people like him in our (pretty sad) industry from this point of view.
What is obvious is that people should be outraged if a successful businessperson is actually a "terrorist sympathizer", because most people, whatever their ideology, would simply consider it to be an outrageous and ridiculous state of affairs if a successful businessperson was allowed to function unimpeded in western society and its business world if they themselves considered the businessperson to be an unapologetic "terrorist sympathizer".
The title is clearly an enagement ploy by the editor because it forces the reader to decide whether they themselves believe the founder is actually a terrorist sympathizer or not. If they don't think so, then it's outrageous that he's been libelled in a such a manner. If they think he is a terrorist sympathizer then it would be outrageous to them that he is allowed to operate unimpeded in western society and its economic realm.
That's why this comment sounds disingenously pedantic and your follow-up comment's detached tone doesn't feel sincere frankly. The article does list specific reasons why he was called a "terrorist sympathizer" and forces the reader to decide whether they themselves would consider the founder a "terrorist sympathizer" given the context in order to come to a conclusion about him in general.
They have a video of people from this group attacking police with sledgehammers. It is strange how much of this 'direction action' is harming Ukraine support and not Israel. If people wanted to support Palestine they can do it without attacking their own countries' military - which is not operating in Israel at all.
> "she was murdered by ICE"
They have a video of her being shot, pretty much needlessly. I'd say that should be manslaughter at a minimum.
Pretty solid basis for direct action.
If they provided this level of support for Russia, they'd be a new Belarus.
The mental effort a lot of people has made to pretend they aren't entirely powerless and irrelevant for stopping Israel's crimes is deeply impressive. The reality is that there's nothing the UK can do to stop Israel as long as the US is supporting them (short of going to war with both the US and Israel), but this reality is at odds with the desire to do something, so people invent and inflate leverage where there isn't any. Moreover, most of the time the very same people oppose creating more leverage for the future, as your added qualifier of "post-colonial" implies. It's depressing.
Post-colonial only implies that Cyprus was a UK colony, and now is not, but still retains some bases in there.
How is direct action on Palestine impacting Ukraine support? (We are also not intervening in Ukraine)
Not direct intervention; but we fly sorties, provide intelligence, ship military equipment, build systems for... None of which we provide Israel for their current war.
It's just odd to me that Israel draws so much Ire when the UK deals with all sorts. There are many worse things happening that doesn't get a second of airtime.
Hahhahaha. Hahaha. Ha.
The cost of this non-intervention is now at almost $200B, is it not? I guess this money went to elves?
Multiple sources linked on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_and_the_Gaza_wa...
The UK might be flying spy planes outside it's airspace when it's citizens were kidnapped. That's not a "combatant". Was the UK a combatant when flying spy planes near the Ukraine border?
I think you are way off the mark based on reporting, I'm not even sure how you are coming to these stated opinions.
First it was, "The British military isn't doing anything in Gaza, anyone who says otherwise is lying."
Now it is, "The British military might be doing something in Gaza, but they're justified in doing so, and it's limited to protecting British citizens anyways."
What will it be now?
"While the Ministry of Defence (MoD) claims these flights are solely for locating Israeli hostages held by Hamas, AOAV found that the RAF conducted 24 flights in the two weeks leading up to and including the day of Israel’s deadly attack on the Nuseirat Refugee Camp on 8 June 2024, which killed 274 Palestinians and injured over 700."
https://aoav.org.uk/2025/britain-sent-over-500-spy-flights-t...
"On October 19, 2024, four days after it had been at RAF Brize Norton, the “Re’em” aircraft with registration 272 appeared directly over Gaza at 7:32 p.m. local time, less than 5km away from Beit Lahiya, a city in north Gaza. Three hours later, at 11:20 p.m., the IAF bombed a residential complex in Beit Lahiya killing at least 73 people.
On October 24, 2024, nine days after traveling to the UK, the same 272 aircraft was located at 9:30 p.m. less than 5 miles from Jabalia camp. An hour later, at 10:40 p.m., airstrikes were recorded destroying apartment blocks in Jabalia. The aircraft remained airborne patrolling the airspace near Gaza until it was recorded at 10:36 p.m. near Ashdod, a coastal city near Tel Aviv, flying towards Hatzor Airbase."
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/revealed-uk-labour-israeli-mi...
Do you have the name or names of the person accused of 'attacking police with sledgehammers'?
I've heard a lot about this, but it's difficult to get to actual sources about exactly what is alleged.
Even if this did happen as you say. attachking police with sledgehammers is assault, potentially even attempted murder. There's plenty of laws for that.
It's not terrorism.
You should be less flippant.
The accused's name is Samuel Corner. He and his friends are still on trial for their actions.
Here's the bodycam footage where you see Samuel Corner attack police seargent Kate Evans with a sledgehammer while she was on the ground, fracturing her spine. Watch from 3m05s to 3m10s:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6P7p_5D4hw
The police seargent is now disabled:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g54g1r15eo
> It's not terrorism.
The group's stated aim is to stop the UK or any UK companies giving Israel any military support. They target companies who they think supply Israel. They break in and smash them, and as you've hopefully just seen with your own eyes, they are not afraid to attack people with sledgehammers. They use violence to achieve their political aim. They are terrorists and belong in prison.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1dzq41n4l9o
> Samuel Corner, 23, [...] Oxford University graduate from Devon [...] when asked why he struck Sgt Evans with the sledgehammer, he replied: "It was me not really knowing what I was doing
Thanks Samuel. That Oxford degree really shows, doesn't it?
"It was me not really knowing what I was doing, I was trying to protect Leona, or Zoe. I couldn't tell who was screaming."
"My friends were in danger and they [the police] were getting quite hands-on.
"I remember just feeling like I had to help somehow. I would never think to do that to someone, I was just trying to help," he said.
I don't have any opinion on this but I think its important to have the full quote
They were petulantly resisting arrest (it looks on camera to scream instead of just complying calmly) while committing destructive/violent crimes. The police were very restrained here. There was no danger from the police, at all.
Now a police officer doing their job has a spinal injury. Palestine Action says they will not stop doing 'direct action' (sabotage, property destruction, violence). They deserve the proscription.
I quoted three separate snippets from the article that I wanted to draw attention to, and gave you the URL to read the rest yourself.
I'm of the opinion that, someone who sledgehammers an unaware opponent and claims in their defense "I was just trying to help", they are being disingenuous. Especially as one of Britain's most elite and privileged youngsters.
If you'd like to quote more of the article:
> When asked by his barrister Tom Wainwright whether he was willing to injure a person or use violence during the break-in, he replied: "No, not at all".
Read that back to yourself while watching the attack footage again. Is this credible testimony?
Obviously "on one occasion, a person in group X did Y" is evidence for "group X does Y". If Samuel Corner attacked a police sergeant with a sledgehammer during one Palestine Action, er, action, then that's the sort of thing we expect to see more often if PA is generally in favour of attacking police with sledgehammers. (Either as a matter of explicit open policy, or as a nudge-nudge-wink-wink thing where everyone in PA knows that if they start smashing up police as well as property then their PA comrades will think better of them rather than worse.)
But it falls way short of proof. Maybe Samuel Corner sledgehammered a cop because Palestine Action is a terrorist organization after all; but maybe Samuel Corner sledgehammered a cop because Samuel Corner is a thug or an idiot or was drunk or whatever. Or maybe Samuel Corner sledgehammered a cop because the cops were already being violent with the Palestine Action folks and he was doing his (ill-advised) best to protect the others from the police. (This, as I understand it, is his account of things.)
(An Oxford University graduate attacked a police officer with a sledgehammer. I take it you would not say that that makes the University of Oxford a terrorist organization, and you wouldn't say that even if he'd done it while attending, say, a university social function rather than while smashing up alleged military hardware. It matters how typical the action is of the organization, what the group's leadership thinks of the action, etc.)
I took a look at the video. It's not easy to tell what's going on, but it looks to me as follows. One of the PA people is on the ground, being forcibly restrained and tasered by a police officer, complaining loudly about what the police officer is doing. (It isn't obvious to me whether or not her complaints are justified[1].) There is another police officer, whom I take to be Kate Evans, nearby, kneeling on the ground and helping to restrain this PA person. Samuel Corner approaches with his sledgehammer and attacks that second police officer. I can't tell from the video exactly what he's trying to do (e.g., whether he's being as violent as possible and hoping to kill or maim, or whether he's trying to get the police officer off the other person with minimal force but all he's got is a sledgehammer).
[1] I get the impression that she feels she has the right not to suffer any pain while being forcibly restrained by police, which seems like a rather naive view of things. But I also get the impression that the police were being pretty free with their tasering. But it's hard to tell exactly what's going on, and I imagine it was even harder in real time, and I am inclined to cut both her and the police some slack on those grounds.
It's highly misleading, even though not technically false, to say that Corner attacked Kate Evans "while she was on the ground"; she certainly was on the ground in the sense that she was supported by the floor, and even in the sense that she wasn't standing up -- I think she was crouching -- but it's not like she was lying on the ground injured or inactive; she was fighting one of the other PA people, and she was "on the ground" because that PA person was (in a stronger sense) "on the ground" too.
For the avoidance of doubt, I do not approve of attacking police officers with sledgehammers just because they are restraining someone you would prefer them not to be restraining, even if you think they're doing it more violently than necessary. And I have a lot of sympathy with police officers not being super-gentle when the people they're dealing with are armed with sledgehammers.
But the story here looks to me more like "there were a bunch of PA people, who had sledgehammers because they were planning to smash up military hardware; the cops arrived and wrestled and tasered them, and one of the PA people lost his temper and went for one of the cops to try to defend his friend whom he thought was being mistreated, and unfortunately he was wielding a sledgehammer at the time" than like "PA is in the business of attacking cops with sledgehammers".
None of that makes Kate Evans any less injured. But I think those two possibilities say very different things about Palestine Action. Carrying sledgehammers because you want to smash equipment is different from carrying sledgehammers because you want to smash people. Attacking police because they are a symbol of the state is different from attacking police because they are attacking your friend. One person doing something bad in the heat of the moment because he thinks his friend is being mistreated is different from an organization setting out to do that bad thing.
There are plenty of documented cases of police being violent (sometimes with deadly effect) with members of the public. Sometimes they have good justification for it, sometimes not so much. Most of us don't on those grounds call the police a terrorist organization. Those who do say things along those lines do so because they think that actually the police are systematically violent and brutal.
I think the same applies to organizations like Palestine Action. So far as I can tell, they aren't systematically violent and brutal. Mostly they smash up hardware that they think would otherwise be used to oppress Palestinians. (I am making no judgement as to whether they're right about that, which is relevant to whether they're a Good Thing or a Bad Thing but not to whether they're terrorists.) Sometimes that leads to skirmishes with the police. On one occasion so far, one of them badly injured a police officer. It's very bad that that happened, but this all seems well short of what it would take to justify calling the organization a terrorist one.
Yet none of them are being prosecuted under the terrorism act, or on any charge related to terrorism.
I think they meet the definition of "terrorists" by their stated goals and acts. But it seems there's reticence by the CPS to break out the Terrorism Act.
Palestine Action is already a proscribed group because of spraypainting RAF planes. I would say this raid seems more terroristic than base invasion, but what do I know? I'm not the Home Secretary.
It raises questions, because while the Terrorism Act is heavily criticised for being overbroad and making a number of otherwise innocuous things crimes, the CPS haven't used it against this group of people, who'd face prison just for being a member, or claiming to be a member of Palestine Action. Maybe the CPS can't reliably prove they are?
Why was her vehicle in gear, engine running?
https://www.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1q7cg7o/minneapolis_ic...
In the extreme, that sort of view makes it impossible to have criminal lawyers. (And not far below that extreme, we have people using all their power to go after independent judges and lawyers with every extrajudicial tool at their disposal, legal system be damned.)
The nuance between speech and action was one of the many casualties of social media. I wonder if, back in the 90's, people would get arrested for holding "FREE KEVIN MITNICK" posters, if we'd had two decades of social media before it.
You mean the group that sneaked in and damaged a bunch of UK Military’s planes on a military base? Was this the action that put them into the terrorist category?
Apparently our standards have dropped so low that spray painting a couple of planes and embarrassing the UK military now puts you on par with those other organisations.
There are lots of violent criminals who harm businesses and injure, or even kill people. They should be prosecuted and imprisoned. It's not illegal to say "I support <name of criminal or criminal gang>", even if people strongly disagree with you.
However, by showing they could break into an RAF base and spraypaint the planes - that says to me that the RAF are completely shit at their job, how can they protect their base from Russians if they can't even keep out local criminals - embarrassed the Government, and the government retaliated by making it illegal to say you support them.
Say it out loud? Criminal. Wear a t-shirt? Criminal. Hold a placard? Criminal.
Might as well just hold up blank sheets of paper and wait for the police to arrest you because they know what you want to write on them, like they do in Russia.
To me, that's a free speech issue. What an affront to free speech it is. Saying you support criminal scumbags should not be a crime. You should be able to say you support a bunch of violent yahoos, to whoever will listen to you, and I should be able to laugh at you and call you a simpleton for your idiot beliefs.
Broadly speaking though, I agree. What they did was criminal damage, undoubtedly, I have no problem arresting and prosecuting people for that. But I don't believe that it's terrorism, nor that it would have been so unpopular had it not been bloody embarrassing for the armed forces. Honestly, bolt cutters and some paint should not be grounding some of your air defence.
> Giving evidence earlier, he said the group's only intention was to "break in, cause as much damage to the factory as possible, destroy weapons and prevent the factory from reopening".
I count "causing as much damage as possible" to be violent.
While I think graffiti taggers "damage property" but are non-violent. But in many places, rival gangs blow up/set alight/demolish their rivals' homes/businesses/vehicles, etc. That counts as pretty strong violence to me, even if no people are injured.
Anyway, talking of people being injured, watch a member of Palestine Action (Samuel Corner, 23, Oxford University graduate) drive a sledgehammer into a police seargent while she's trying to arrest his comrade:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g54g1r15eo
Full video, sledgehammer attack at 3m05s to 3m10s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6P7p_5D4hw
I'd designate them as a terrorist group for destroying factories, not so much for spraypainting planes. But I'd still support your right to say you support them, even though I'd disagree.
That is just not what the word violent means (unless used figuratively but I don't think that's what you mean). It means hurting, or attempting to hurt, a person (or maybe an animal). Setting fire or blowing up a home which might have people still in it is certainly violent, but destroying property for the sake or property destruction is not.
Of course, deliberately attacking someone with a sledgehammer certainly is.
If I intentionally wreck your home, like I properly ransack the place, smash it all up, I'd say I had been violent to you. Wouldn't you? You wouldn't walk in to find your home and your life ruined and say "oh it's just property damage", would you?
If my nation was at war with yours, and we dropped a bomb on your weapons factory, would you count that as violent, or non-violent?
(I would say you'd been violent to me if you'd slapped me in the face. I would rather be slapped in the face than have my house ransacked and smashed up. Some not-violent things are worse than some violent things.)
If you dropped a bomb on a weapons factory that had, or plausibly could have had, people in it then that would unquestionably be an act of violence. If you somehow knew that there was nothing there but hardware then I wouldn't call it an act of violence.
(In practice, I'm pretty sure that when you drop a bomb you scarcely ever know that you're not going to injure or kill anyone.)
I'm not claiming that this is the only way, or the only proper way, to use the word "violence". But, so far as I can tell from introspection, it is how I would use it.
There are contexts in which I would use the word "violence" to include destruction that only affects things and not people. But they'd be contexts that already make it clear that it's things and not people being affected. E.g., "We smashed up that misbehaving printer with great violence, and very satisfying it was too".
There's certainly implied violence. Like, if you done that once, maybe you'll be back tomorrow when I happen to be in, and actually be violent to me. And even if that weren't the case, I'd still obviously be very distressed about the situation.
But, having said all that, no I wouldn't say you had been violent, if you hadn't actually tried to hurt anyone.
If you dropped a bomb on an abandoned or fully automated factory, that you could be 100% sure doesn't have any people in it - then I still wouldn't count that as "violent" (except maybe figuratively), no matter how destructive.
Sure I destroyed their car and they weren't able to go to work and got fired, but I didn't physically attack them so no harm done.
> A police sergeant was left unable to drive, shower or dress herself after a Palestine Action activist allegedly hit her with a sledgehammer during a break-in at an Israeli defence firm's UK site, a trial has heard.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g54g1r15eo
Of course, one violent member does not make an organisation into a terrorist organisation. But, just as a matter of fact, there has been some actual violence against a person.
Oh, and don’t come crying when the same authoritarian laws put in place for Palestine Action are used to label your cause as terrorism to quash dissent.
https://news.sky.com/story/bodycam-footage-of-alleged-sledge...
But it is good to know that criminal assault is now equivalent to terrorism.
2) So arms manufacturers participating in a war (at best!) are now equivalent to.. gay establishments? I suggest thinking through your examples before sharing them :)
Roughly 75% of Palestinians support terrorism (the number changes with every survey but it's consistently over 50%).
The lady in Minneapolis was using her car as a weapon to impede law enforcement operations. That's not really terrorism; insurrection would be a more accurate description. But she certainly wasn't a good person deserving of any sympathy.
A hysterical take like this isn't really credible. "Obstruction", sure, but calling a stopped vehicle a "weapon" because it's slightly in the way defies the English language to the point where you damage your own credibility.
It would be equivalent to call this comment a "weapon" I'm using to impede you announcing your opinion unopposed.
She's absolutely deserving of sympathy; she was killed unjustly. We don't have a law on the books allowing capital punishment for parking a vehicle somewhere law enforcement finds it inconvenient. Just because you happen not to agree with her actions at the time, illegal or no, doesn't imply "and therefore she deserved death". I suggest you consider the consequences to your own self of people applying your own logic to you, and how long you would last if this was the general state of affairs.
[1] https://lamag.com/news/cox-family-heir-james-fergie-chambers...
This sentence would be better without the scare quotes. Something like "calling out those in tech who support what he views as a genocide."
1. Ukraine’s media restrictions are virtually non-existent when compared to those enforced by the Israelis in Gaza, including the intentional bombing of media offices. Keep in mind that Hamas has repeatedly called upon Israel to allow foreign press and NGOs to visit and see what’s happening on the ground.
2. The Ukraine war is a conventional war between sovereign nations with standing militaries with equivalent capabilities (air force, anti-air defenses, armored vehicles, bomb shelters, etc). The Gaza genocide is an onslaught by a sovereign nation with a well equipped military against a militant group in a dense urban area. Leveling entire city blocks when fighting against an opponent that has no air force or anti-air capabilities is not only unimpressive, but also breaks the principle of proportionality.
2. You're making a bunch of separate accusations without connecting them to the topic at hand, which was press restrictions.
Let me reiterate: Ukraine is a sovereign nation with a sovereign military that has the ability to enforce restrictions within its own territory.
To bring your bad analogy more in line with reality on the ground, imagine if Ukraine was still part of/occupied by the USSR/Russia, and Russia enforced press restrictions across all of Ukrainian territory during a Ukrainian insurgency. However, in this theoretical USSR, Ukrainians did not get Soviet citizenship, and were under a total blockade.
> The only major difference is that Ukraine is >1000x larger, and has safe areas far from any fighting where such press restrictions aren't needed.
But Israel never allowed press into the strip, even during “ceasefire” periods - like right now! This implies that Israel is not somehow paternalistically concerned for press safety; it simply wants a media blackout.
So no, this “major difference” is irrelevant when comparing restrictions between the two conflicts.
> and Russia enforced press restrictions across all of Ukrainian territory
Your analogy isn't very different from reality. Russia does enforce press restrictions near military assets, including in occupied parts of Ukraine.
> However, in this theoretical USSR, Ukrainians did not get Soviet citizenship, and were under a total blockade.
That would seem very unfair, if Russia did it just because they're mean and not because this hypothetical Ukraine had launched tens of thousands of rockets at them. But I'm not sure what it has to do with press restrictions.
> even during “ceasefire” periods
The ceasefire was pretty much dead once Hamas attacked IDF soldiers in Rafah. Now it's just a lower-intensity conflict. Still not a great idea to have random journalists waltzing around and tweeting photos of military assets.
> it simply wants a media blackout
This is a funny explanation because there are millions of cameras in Gaza anyway, and this is the second most covered conflict (by metrics like article count) in all of human history. Not much of a "blackout" at all.
On one side, two sovereign nations setting press restrictions in areas they control. Standard stuff.
On the other side, a genocidal state blockading a tiny strip of land for 20 years waging a campaign that has killed & maimed so many children that we have lost count unilaterally enforcing a total international media blackout. Also standard stuff.
Silly me, how could I even argue about this? It’s just so damn obvious! Sometimes, arguing with random anons on HN pays off :)
> your good faith arguments have convinced me!
> Silly me, how could I even argue about this? It’s just so damn obvious!
> That would seem very unfair, if Russia did it just because they're mean
> Still not a great idea to have random journalists waltzing around and tweeting photos of military assets.
> This is a funny explanation
Hamas casualties make up only a portion of palestinian casualties; palestinian casualties make up only a portion of excess deaths; excess deaths make up only a portion of total deaths.
It’s not clear that Hamas limits their counts to excess deaths. Even if they intended to, a lot of it is based on a web form, with not much validation besides basic checks that the person exists etc.
As with pretty much any conflict, there's a ton of uncertainly, and people shouldn't be recklessly speculating based on things like WhatsApp chats. Responsible casualty estimates would look more like Ukraine, where for example Zelenskyy said "tens of thousands" (one significant digit) were killed in Mariupol.
There is no census scheduled for 2027. Gaza (much like Israel) does not conduct full censuses on a regular schedule. Neither Gaza nor Israel have scheduled their next full census at this time. The most recent census for Gaza was 2017 (for comparison Israel's most recent was 2008). All population numbers of relevance are determined by statistical methods. For large numbers, this is perfectly adequate.
> As with pretty much any conflict, there's a ton of uncertainly, and people shouldn't be recklessly speculating based on things like WhatsApp chats.
Numbers of deaths aren't being estimated from WhatApp chats. The most widely agreed upon estimates are based on morgue data, which if anything should undercount the actual death toll as plenty of bodies never make it to a morgue operated by health professionals. These health professionals are the same ones giving the birth rate estimates.
> Responsible casualty estimates would look more like Ukraine, where for example Zelenskyy said "tens of thousands" (one significant digit) were killed in Mariupol.
That's not what one significant digit means. That is an order of magnitude estimate. I believe everyone is in agreement that the death toll of the gaza war was likewise in the tens of thousands. 1 significant digit would indicate how many tens of thousands. For example, death tolls for Mariupol range from between 20,000 and 90,000. Estimates for Gaza range between 60,000 and 100,000, or roughly half the band for Mariupol. Note that Ukraine does not have access to Mariupol to investigate, as the war is still ongoing, whereas we are several months past the ceasefire in Gaza. Based on pre-war numbers, natural deaths unrelated to the conflict should be a rounding error at this resolution.
Certainly the claim that the population increase is proof of anything is absurd.
2027 is the expectation, since it's supposed to be at least every ten years.
> Numbers of deaths aren't being estimated from WhatApp chats.
Unfortunately they are. [1] was based on messages in "X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Telegram". An example of content they scraped is [2], but they also included non-public chats in WhatsApp etc.
> The most widely agreed upon estimates are based on morgue data, which if anything should undercount the actual death toll as plenty of bodies never make it to a morgue operated by health professionals.
This isn't the case even for GHM's official counts. Anyone can report a Gazan "martyr" or missing person on a web form right here [3]. Those get included in GHM's counts, if they pass basic checks like the existence of that name and ID.
> That's not what one significant digit means.
I think the concept still applies, though I should have said zero significant digits, since "tens of thousands" implies an exponent but zero digits of the mantissa. But my point is that responsible estimates involve acknowledgement of uncertainty.
> I believe everyone is in agreement that the death toll of the gaza war was likewise in the tens of thousands.
Most of Israel's critics are not satisfied with Hamas' ~70k casualty figure, and seek out higher estimates like the aforementioned one that used WhatsApp chats. For example, a HNer yesterday wrote "They've killed people in the hundreds of thousands in Gaza now."
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
>the casualty count that Hamas claims
The Gaza Health Ministry's count is widely regarded as an underestimate, but mostly by people who don't refer to it with a dogwhistling caveat.
50,000 births by july of 2024 (starting with october 7th 2023) [2]
you can sum and extrapolate the numbers. you can probably find more numbers about births
[1] https://www.savethechildren.net/news/about-130-children-born...
[2] https://www.savethechildren.net/news/women-self-inducing-lab...
Scare quotes don’t mean that it’s not true.
When I pointed out that Saudi Arabia has its own abysmal human rights record, Masad drew a contrast.
“I just think about how Replit is going to be used. Like, Israel is actively committing genocide and ethnic cleansing, and if you sell to the government there, it’s possible that they’re going to use it for that,” he said, pointing to the country’s use of Microsoft cloud services to track Palestinians’ phone calls. (After an investigation by The Guardian, Microsoft said it disabled the services that made the tracking possible in September."
Is Saudi Arabia a human rights violator? Yeah and so is a bunch of western governments. But no modern government comes close to the abuses of the Israeli government and Israeli military. This is the view of the free people of this world.
Not only there is not a good argument for considering 1948 war a genocide on Palestinians but there is a much stronger argument Arabs have tried to genocide Jews (especially to those who think who think there was a genocide in Gaza because of starvation as a weapon of war + intent):
1. In 1948 Arab forces besieged Jerusalem and they were starting to run out of food.
2. Azzam Pasha, General Secretary of the Arab League, famously threatened "a war of extermination and a momentous massacre", Fawzi al-Qawuqji, commander of the Arab Liberation Army said that "we will have to initiate total war. We will murder, wreck and ruin everything standing in our way, be it English, American or Jewish.". Hell, several have even extended the threats to not just the Jews of Mandatory Palestine, but to Jews of the Arab world as a whole, such as Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Said("if a satisfactory solution of the Palestine case was not reached, severe measures should be taken against all Jews in Arab countries.") or the head of the Egyptian delegation to the General Assembly, Muhammad Hussein Heykal("the lives of 1,000,000 Jews in Muslim countries would be jeopardized by the establishment of a Jewish state." ). As Matiel Mughannam, head of the Arab Women's Organization in Palestine put it in an interview with Nadia Lourie in January 1948, "The UN decision has united all Arabs, as they have never been united before, not even against the Crusaders.... [A Jewish state] has no chance to survive now that the `holy war' has been declared. All the Jews will eventually be massacred. " (See Benny Morris' 1948 for sources on all of these)
It truly does though. Any significant pile of it stinks of exploitation and death.
More plainly on my part, though I'm worried sounds like berating when the comments are viewed consecutively: what does that have to do with the article we are discussing?
No matter what the political views, running into "real" money radicalizes most people and gives them the impression that they reached a superior evolutionary stage that uniquely entitles them... no, demands from them that they bend society and human civilization to their will, reshape it in their image, make it better because they are better. A sort of messianic complex.
This is the famous horseshoe paradox that says extremes are closer to each other than to the center. They might look completely different in their views but in reality they're back to back in the same place. 2 sides of the same coin. Different imprint, same value.
Compared to when? How many times in history has wealth been less concentrated?
As far as I'm aware, for almost all of history post-agriculture, wealth was highly concentrated while the average person lived in abject poverty (think: kings vs peasants). The mid-20th century was an era of mass prosperity in the US and parts of Europe, but it was an anomalous few decades, not the norm.
But to those living and remembering that era - it was the norm that they (we) compare with, so it is the reference that matters.
Mostly all of them! There have been periods where inequality dropped, but mostly it's been rising since at least the 1300s. I'm on mobile and can't link research, but there are a few papers that investigate this.
> As far as I'm aware, for almost all of history post-agriculture, wealth was highly concentrated while the average person lived in abject poverty (think: kings vs peasants).
And yet it was less unequal than now, an era where we've managed to use technology to concentrate wealth at an unprecedented scale. No longer is the richest person you know the king who collects your taxes next door, now it's a SV trillionaire on the other side of the world.
That is what has changed.
If you want to learn more you could do worse than follow Zachary Foster's lectures for the Rutgers Center:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=zachary+foster+...
The podcast The Empire Never Ended has recently finished a rather good series on Meir Kahane, one of the most important influences on contemporary zionism:
Yes. And one side of the coin supports and justifies colonialism, apartheid and even genocide; the other side fights against it.
apartheid /ə-pärt′hīt″, -hāt″/ noun
- An official policy of racial segregation formerly practiced in the Republic of South Africa, involving political, legal, and economic discrimination against nonwhites.
- A policy or practice of separating or segregating groups.
- The condition of being separated from others; segregation
Explain to me how this does not fit bullet point 2 and 3.
From The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition[1].
Unfortunately they added a limit to the number of collaborators per account and we had to stop using it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba
Palestinians have every right to resist occupation.
Genuinely curious what you think would have happened if all the Islamic countries would not have attacked Israel. Would there be a peaceful Palestinian country? Guess we'll never know....
But that's all history. Your "occupation resistors" decided to rampage through towns and a music festival and massacre everyone they met. And somehow you seem okay with that.
Yes, the Nakba is ongoing.
It is a natural human tendency to desire that the people who inflict pain upon others to also feel pain inflicted upon them. This has been the human condition since ancient times, and yet the most revered figures in human history have been the pacifists who consistently advocate against violence (e.g. Gautama Buddha, Jesus Christ, Lao Tzu, Gandhi, MLK, etc).
Just in general, asserting that everyone will agree with your side in the future is such a bizarre rhetorical tactic. Do you honestly think this convinces anybody to reconsider their position?
Notice that we have a holiday for MLK, and Indians have a holiday to celebrate Gandhi. Something deep inside all of us knows that pacifism is “correct”.
But you can tell it’s all motivated reasoning. Standing with your tribe. It’s not much of a matter of honour. It’s just flashing your banners.
In the end, they are wealthy, but they are just people. And they have all these things and why do I really care what Ja Rule has to say about the new cyclone.
Yes, it would be dishonorable to be mercenary, but being a tribalist is merely the default position. We’re all so at some scale.
Elons politics are similar to Trumps, and Trump isn’t hurting.
I tried their AI coding feature a few months back, and it was quite bad, but it was interesting to watch it iterate.
So they caught up with Replit there, but AI wise replit didn't catch up with them. Sure it is interesting to watch it iterate, but that is also interesting for all the others as they do that too, just better.
I cannot see why one would use replit over the rest at this point but obviously that can change if it does get significantly better.
The only interesting bit is how so many investors were unable to see through the obvious act and also failed to do the due diligence which is the One Job of VC firms (i.e., if I'm an investor, I'm trusting the VC to do real due diligence, otherwise why wouldn't I just invest directly in the companies).
The headline frames this as a paradox, as if these two things are incompatible. But they aren't mutually exclusive, he can be both.
Of course, smartphones' cameras are so good and accessible, but not anyone who became a professional photographer?
And of course, isn't software engineering far beyond than simply writing code in any form - whether in English or in symbols?
engineering: implementing an 8088 emulator
science: discovering a way to make an 8088 emulator using quantum computing
Software engineering is systems and measurement.
Capacity planning, growth rates, algorithmic complexity (typically not to the point of designing new fundamental algorithms), durability, DR, eventual consistency, race conditions, schema design, systems architecture, instrumentation, statistics, sampling, more measurement, tech debt maintenance and pragmatism, online migrations, designing for five nines uptime ...
Programming is turning requirements into code with or without respect to these higher level criteria. The implementation detail.
"Engineering would be programming, but well" fits :)
The problem is, when there are no trainee and junior positions (and, increasingly, intermediate) being filled any more... there is no way for people to rise to senior levels. And that is going to screw up many industries hard.
Now there’s one or two guys out there with a total station and/or drone. You’ve gone from 10 techs/junior positions per surveyor to 1. The average surveyor is something like 60 years old and has no successor lined up.
Not sure what about this is contrarian.
Let's try Elon Musk then: "He was called a 'fascist'. Now, his tech company is valued $1.5T"
This is the way, right?
I guess it means almost as little as "fascist" then.
Which I guess means almost as little as "antisemite" then.
I'll give the writer this -- they conveyed a lot of information in just one short first sentence. I read a bit farther, but it didn't tell me anything I couldn't already guess from that sentence.