pbiggar

One of the biggest shocks to me was that YC now invests in war and killing people. Before their closest connecting to killing people was investing in companies that had severe negative effects for society, like Doordash or AirBnb. Now they're helping people make missiles.

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/ares-industries

Shocking to me that a terrorist attack by Israel is being lauded in the New York Times (and indeed on HN).

I imagine the flagging is to stop the conversation about the geneocide, especially since almost every conversation about Gaza gets flagged.

"Should you accept to play this game?"

Absolutely yes. I like games. The purpose of games is to have fun. This seems like a fun game for like the first $20, a sum I can afford to play a fun game for 10 minutes.

Then at the end, I get to say "I once lost $20 to Steve Balmer playing binary search", which is a fun sentence I can dine out on, and is worth more than $20 to me.

I feel like perhaps this is why MS under Balmer lost relevance. Too busy looking at the technical and not the human.

Lying in an SEC filing is not "just a few documents".

It's not. If you can sacrifice just one without a cost to the other, than they will. Witness the US leaving Vietnam and what would have happened if US soldiers were not facing a grueling war. Witness other asymmetric wars such as Iraq (500,000 Iraqi civilians killed and only 5,000 US soldiers) or the genocide in Gaza now (50,000-200,000 killed by Israel).

If one side has the ability to wage war at no human cost, it will mean massive human cost for civilians, as we constantly see.

In favor of sacrificing a different nation's youth, right?

The claim that this is is about national security is absurd. It's about Palestine, and Blinken and Romney admitted as much.

https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2024/05/06/senato...

> Romney replied, "Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians, relative to other social media sites — it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts."

Here's a twitter thread that documents the protest directly from the protestors, culminating in their arrest:

https://twitter.com/NoTechApartheid/status/17804222178780817...

Here's his original tweet: https://twitter.com/paddycosgrave/status/1712790539844612553...

> I’m shocked at the rhetoric and actions of so many Western leaders & governments, with the exception in particular of Ireland’s government, who for once are doing the right thing. War crimes are war crimes even when committed by allies, and should be called out for what they are.

Meanwhile, BDS just announced a boycott of Intel

> “Ethical responsibility and international law aside, by insisting on investing tens of billions of dollars in Israel, a ‘war zone,’ only miles away from occupied Gaza, Intel is putting its leaders’ fanatic ideological commitment to Israel over financial and fiduciary responsibility. Why else would Intel freeze plans to expand its chipmaking manufacturing in Ohio while throwing those billions into Israel, a state committing genocide?

https://bdsmovement.net/Press-Release-BDS-Launches-Boycott-I...

Imagine announcing you're going to build a plant in Israel in the middle of Israel committing a genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza. Evil company

https://bdsmovement.net/Press-Release-BDS-Launches-Boycott-I...

To "install" create a bookmark in chrome and then add this as the url. Then on anyone's twitter profile, just click the bookmark.

That's because it's stated goal is a lie. If it's stated goal was real -- take out Hamas and follow the rules of war -- they wouldn't have killed 15,000 children.

We're changing the license! Not because of this, but I guess it addresses it.

This is because the kids are pro-Palestine [1], and because of that, so is content on Tiktok. The massive killing and destruction of Gaza is visible and the kids don't like it.

And so, AIPAC is pissed that everyone can see the apartheid and the bombs dropping on families in Gaza. The US would rather control the media (like they did in the invasion of Iraq, and like they have now which led to the scandal in the nytimes).

[1] https://www.vox.com/culture/23997305/tiktok-palestine-israel...

If you're going to quote Hamas, a bit dishonest of you to quote their 1988 document instead of their 2017 one.

"16. Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity."

I addressed that in the first line!

To restate: why is Hamas' attack on Oct 7 bad? It's because they killed civilians. If we condemn that, then we must condemn all the IDF killings of civilians. If we do not, what basis do we have to condemn Hamas?

Israel's killing of civilians is a horrendous war crime. No we are not doing a carve-out because they really want to kill Hamas fighters. Absurd and horrific to suggest that.

You twisted my words: I said "not entitled". Accidental civilian killings are not acceptable but yes of course they happen. Deliberate killing of civilians are war crimes.

We must hold the IDF to the same standard as we hold Hamas. Neither is allowed kill civilians, neither is allowed starve a population, neither is allowed detain civilians (whether as "hostages" or "administrative detainees"), neither is allowed to commit rape, neither is allowed commit war crimes.

The issue is that the IDF is much worse than Hamas on all these things:

- Israel has killed 30,000 (though the number is suspected to be as high as 50,000 now, and it continues to increase), while Hamas killed 700 civilians (I'll leave aside the very credible claims that Israel killed a good number of it's own)

- Israel has a much worse ratio of civilians to valid military targets (possibly between 5/1 and 8/1 ratio, while Hamas has 2/1 ratio during Hamas' attack, and it is believed many of those were killed by the IDF)

- Hamas has only killed civilians during the Oct 7 attack. Israel is killing hundreds of civilians per day, and has used rhetoric that indicates this is deliberate [4]. Even Biden, who claims he is a zionist, called Israeli bombing of civilian areas "indiscriminate" [5]. There are plenty of videos online of the IDF killing civilians, including today an old deaf man was killed by a soldier, and congratulated by his squad [11].

- Hamas has apologized for killing civilians; Israel has justified killing and claims it can and will continue to do so, including by denying aid (a war crime)

- Israel denies aid to civilians, directly causing a famine; Hamas does not starve civilians

- Hamas has by all accounts treated its detainees well; Israel tortures and rapes and sexually abuses its detainees [1]

- Israel is deliberately targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure (it claims Hamas is hiding there, which does not excuse it and this is a war crime)

- Hamas has been alleged to have committed a total of 3 acts of sexual violence (this is heavily disputed, see [2]). However the IDF has committed dozens of acts of torture [9] and rape [1] (this is only counting since Oct 7, but Israel has been killing, torturing and committing sexual violence against Palestinians since 1948, eg [12] )

- Hamas took 250 detainees, Israel had over 1000 before Oct 7 [10] and it increased to over 2000 since Oct 7 [3]. After releasing detainees as part of the short ceasefire, Israel recaptured some of the same people. An Israeli sniper shot a child who celebrated the return of a family member.

- There are multiple credible reports of execution of civilians by the IDF outside of combat situations (that is, they came into a place, expelled the women and children, and executed all the men and older boys) [6] [7]

- Israel has been killing thousands of Palestinians for years, including thousands in Gaza in 2021 and 2014, and of course 15,000 killed and 750,000 displaced in the massacres during the original invasion of Palestine by the settlers who created Israel. [8]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/22/claims-of-isra...

[2] https://www.oct7factcheck.com/sexual-violence

[3] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/11/israel-opt-ho...

[4] https://isitgenocide.com/)

[5] https://apnews.com/article/biden-israel-hamas-oct-7-44c4229d...

[6] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/1/20/palestinians-accuse...

[7] https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2024/1/18/video-s...

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba

[9] https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6153/

[10] https://www.btselem.org/administrative_detention/statistics

[11] https://twitter.com/muhammadshehad2/status/17664047969095886...

[12] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/4/10/anger-erupts-over-v...

> What's going on in Gaza is an unacceptable humanitarian tragedy that is a reaction to an unacceptable attack.

Why is one a humanitarian tragedy but the other an unnacceptable attack. You're trying to absolve Israel of its role in the killing of 30,000 civilians over 5 months, to the condemnation of the entire world.

Israel is not entitled to kill civilians under any circumstances, not even if Hamas makes it hard to attack Hamas directly. If you look at the statements of Israeli leaders, it is clear that the killing of Palestinians is intentional [1]. As has been the long policy of apartheid and annexation of the West bank (where, you might remember, there is no Hamas).

Finally, to be clear the protest is of a Google exec by a Google employee over a google policy/contract which is part of the IDF's murderous policy.

[1] https://isitgenocide.com/

I can't believe that there's a US-supported genocide in Palestine and YC is advertising for "New defense tech". The most tone deaf thing I've ever seen

Another area not discussed in the article is Meta's (especially on IG) suppression of Palestinian content. They're not alone in this of the social media companies, but they are the most aggressive.

This means that Meta, and realistically one person, Mark Zuckerberg, is able to have massive impact on even the conversations people are having.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/dec/21/meta-face...

I worked on this a bit! As an summer intern at SCEE in 2004, I port the Eyetoy driver to PS2 linux. Sadly, it had some legal issues due to some proprietary code in the original drivers, and it ended up not getting released.

Would love to be able to speed this up!

I'm not an expert on terrorism, obviously. I just believe that it's immoral to drop bombs on civilians.

Like any other conflict, for a positive end result there has to be a meeting of the minds on both sides, committed to peace.

So this is going to seem very one sided, but if you look prior to Oct 7, you can't have peace where one side controls everything, has all the resources, and uses them to keep the other population "occupied". That is always going to breed resistance.

Very simply, for peace Israel should pull all the settlements out of the West Bank, pull back 50 miles from Gaza for a number of years, remove all checkpoints in the West Bank and Gaza, invest in the development of both areas, rebuild the airport they destroyed, stop and sign definitive peace accords allowing free movement and Right of Return for Palestinians, pay reparations for the destruction of Gaza and the damage to the West Bank (plus many other things that I won't list here), and finally on top of that invest in Palestine's future.

The only good neighbour is a prosperous one.

The bluesky nazi bar one? How is that emotional?

Of course we're biased. 20,000 people have been killed by indescrimimate bombing. I would hope that makes you biased too

Which one are you thinking? It feels to me this was the first post I've written with real emotion.

For me, Ukraine and Palestine are the same team: the oppressed fighting a powerful oppressor. Plus, I'm Irish - we're always on the side of the colonized.

Though in this one, I live in the country oppressing (that being the US), and I'm part of the movement doing the oppressing (that being tech). So there's duty to speak up.

I think by "involved" you mean victims, right? I read that wrong the first time and thought you were making the opposite point.

Completely agree that the framing is deliberate and bullshit. When you see what's actually happening, it's hard to believe that they're not actually trying to push Gazans into the sea (or Egypt).