I see people saying this story doesn't belong on HN. genuine question, if this story were about a german national would it be considered as political? is palestinian existence inherently more political than other peoples' existence?
Either we allow _all_ political content or nothing.
The HN guidelines are incredibly grey and handwave-y
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
To me HN became to big for its own good since the Covid days. It's like the reddit front page except there are no subs with mods but one big flood (basically /r/all).
If I got to /r/linux, /r/selfhosted/, /r/networking/ or other tech subs I'll probably find what I saw on HN 15 years ago. But less and less here.
Ban all politics, and you ban >99% of HN content. Heck, the very concept of HN itself is political!
AI is also being used (unfortunately) to make decisions. AI is therefore political (massively so).
What to Submit 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. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
If the story was about a German national then yes, I would still say this is political and doesn't gratify my intellectual curiosity.
One example: If you want to see how bad the LLM slop commenting is, showdead is very helpful. It's not as bad as some people think, but it's certainly non-zero. On the plus side, those comments do seem to get identified and flagged/killed pretty quickly.
It's as far from hacking interest as it gets for me.
On the plus side, it does make for an interesting barely scientific way to poll for popularity of a topic on HN. Absolutely not worth it IMHO, but it is at least a bit interesting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45202200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47136179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46543457
This has nothing to do with tech, isn't something hackers would find interesting, and doesn't satisfy intellectual curiosity, end of story. It's generic run of the mill nightly news slop that I could get from literally anywhere else if I wanted to waste my time reading/watching uninteresting news that doesn't affect me.
US Politics seems to get more of a pass, probably due to Silicon Valley being there (and nearly all the major tech outlets), similarly some China news gets a pass, also largely when it relates to supply chain and Taiwan.
This goes beyond US politics. The US and Israel do not exist in a bubble. This conflict can and will have big repercussions which will impact our technical and entrepreneurial institutions.