Israel's Iron Dome Is Amazing, and That's a Problem | Hacker News Reader

Israel's Iron Dome Is Amazing, and That's a Problem

businessweek.com

21 pointsidoco20 comments

Dozens of people are being killed and someone has the nerve to right about one of the country'so PR problem. This doesn't belong on HN. I'm usually open to interesting non-hacker relevant articles but this is nothing but propaganda. The remark that Israel is only attacking terrorists is particularly ignorant. It was reported yesterday that out of the 100 dead Palestinians more than half were women and children.

Yes, talking about a PR problem when innocent people are dying is bad. Yes, this article is full of praises for Israel, and that can be understood as propaganda. We can also argue about the term "terrorist": Brits have called (Boston) Tea Party folks "terrorists", for US they are heroes. Yes, it is really, really, really awful when innocent human beings die (children, women, men - it doesn't matter). YET: Hamas isn't going out to the desert and attacking Israel. They deliberately choose densely populated Gaza areas, full of innocent people (yes, many of them may have sympathy for Hamas, but that isn't a crime), taking in account that the counterattack will kill many civilians. While the bombs that have killed all those people have come from Israel, the decision to kill them was made by Hamas.

> ... right about one of the country'so PR problem. This doesn't belong on HN

It seems it is up-voted and you seem to have opinions about and want to discuss it. So ... discuss. If it gets too heated the story will quickly flow down or disappear from front age.

Using articles like this for propaganda is also a good point. Or how ABC's Diane Sawyer shows images of Palestinians gathering belongings from their destroyed home and puts the "An Israeli family trying to salvage what they can." caption under it. That is also interesting. If she knew they were not Israeli would she have put the picture up anyway? So discussing how propaganda works or doesn't work is fitting and it happens often here.

More than a few of those Palestinian children died because their elders chose to put them in harm's way by placing rocket launchers in schools, mosques, and hospitals.

Please, let's stop this. We do not know this (it may well be propaganda). Furthermore it does still not give anyone the right to bomb Gaza like that.

Let's shut down this thread ASAP and not destroy HN.

Let focus on technology this js the first rocket anti rocket system that actually works. Brilliant.

Id love to know more about the tech and that's what should be focussed on here but the link is a useless propaganda piece providing very little info on the tech.

Ironic you bring up the term ignorance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fko9F1EAU2g

Although I don't want to discuss politics on HN (there are plenty of more appropriate places to do that), the interesting issue to me is how (presumably) intelligent people in a certain field can drop all intellectual honesty when it comes to a different field.

Hmmmm... So, for every thousand rockets 100 land. If 100 rockets landed in NYC or London, it would be a tragedy. Up the amount of damage per rocket, and things get even uglier more quickly. I'm not really sure why the author thinks one side is winning some sort of public opinion war because they other side is more effective at defending themselves.

At any rate, solving peace in the Middle East isn't going to happen on HN, so perhaps we should skip the topic?

I think the increased role that technology is playing in warfare - e.g. drones, computer-assisted missile defense, etc. is most certainly relevant to our industry. Ignoring the moral questions won't make them go away.

They land because Iron Dome allows them to pass when they don't hit a populated area. The number of rockets that actually hit targets should be much lower than 10%.

Also interesting - CNN Opinion: How Iron Dome missile defense buys time for Israel http://edition.cnn.com/2014/07/11/opinion/israel-iron-dome-o...

the iron dome doesn't prevent me from feeling sympathy for israelis under rocket attack.

its the volume of palestinian children killed by the idf according to official figures... which is much greater than /all/ of the israeli casualties in the conflict combined.

shame on them. in fact you know what... if it were children and other innocents living near me that were suffering the threat of extermination whilst being treated inhumanely under occupation... i might feel inclined to want to launch rockets at you if i was feeling particularly forgiving and kind :/

The final section on the wikipedia page for "Iron Dome", has a few citations questioning the effectiveness of the system. I have no idea how accurate those sources are.

Even if those criticisms are incorrect, there are still blindingly obvious countermeasures that could be fairly easily be installed into the rockets that would reduce the effectiveness of Iron Dome.

So this success if it exists, could be short lived.

No, most of these rockets are incredibly primitive. They can't easily install countermeasures, no matter how obvious they might seem. (The amount of advanced rockets from Iran is limited.)

And I was talking about incredibly primitive countermeasures.

In some sad way - it is true. Though it's better to prevent people getting killed by rockets, than getting better PR.

How iron dome works http://youtu.be/WHH6MRmw_Jo

This post was killed by user flags.

The tiny country and its engineers have managed to outperform any anti rocket developed to this day and be the first country to successfully develop a working rocket anti rocket syatem that actually works. This is a great achievement fir technology and defense systems. No wonder israel has the highest #nobel prizes / population in the wold.

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