> Captain Ernest Medina told his men that nearly all the civilian residents of the hamlets in Sơn Mỹ village would have left for the market by 07:00, and that any who remained would most likely be VC or VC sympathizers. He was asked whether the order included the killing of women and children. Those present later gave differing accounts of Medina's response. Some, including platoon leaders, testified that the orders, as they understood them, were to kill all VC and North Vietnamese combatants and "suspects" (including women and children, as well as all animals), to burn the village, and pollute the wells.[23] He was quoted as saying, "They're all VC, now go and get them", and was heard to reply to the question "Who is my enemy?", by saying, "Anybody that was running from us, hiding from us, or appeared to be the enemy. If a man was running, shoot him, sometimes even if a woman with a rifle was running, shoot her."
> "A sweep operation was conducted recently… Crazy American enemy used light machine guns and all kinds of weapons to kill our innocent civilian people in [My Lai]. Most of them were women, kids, just born babies and pregnant women. They shot everything they saw. They killed all domestic animals. They burned all people’s houses. There were 26 families killed completely – no survivors… The American wolf forgot its good sheep’s appearance."
> "The only crime I have committed is in judgement of my values. Apparently, I valued my troops’ lives more than I did the lives of the enemy." -- William Calley, ‘C’ Company lieutenant
Even though innocent brothers and sisters in tech are being slaughtered now, I expect this thread to be flagged and locked within minutes... It is already flagged off the front page.
It seems highly unlikely IDF would waste resources target individual civilians, follow them around Gaza and eliminate them to prevent their skills being used by Hamas, when the same techniques (say, cell phone tracking drones) can be used directly against high value targets in the Hamas leadership, or at the very least the foot soldiers who are likely to be around such targets.
Regardless of specific technique for target selection, resource pressure is still there, IDF has thus far failed in its stated goal to eradicate Hamas leadership. A React-JS programmer is simply a bad target to spend resources on.
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.
> It seems highly unlikely IDF would waste resources target individual civilians, follow them around Gaza and eliminate them to prevent their skills being used by Hamas
This has nothing to do with optimizing resources to defeat Hamas. If Tel Aviv regime really wanted that, they should just stop allowing Netanyahu to fund Hamas[1] in his effort to undermine Palestine Authority (the Palestinian group that actually gave up on armed resistance), as the later can't be presented as a proper boogeyman to keep the public scared dumb.
It's all about sabotaging the two-state solution, maintaining the apartheid and enforcing a media blackout, not allowing the Palestinians to document the genocide and ethnic cleansing being perpetrated against them. First IDF targeted and killed journalists in droves, as previously discussed here[2]. But the images from the daily massacres, filmed by victims, still circled the world. Targeting IT staff is a criminal decision to make more difficult for the war crimes to be properly documented and known.
> From using drones with mounted guns to this, technology is being abused to carry out this vicious moment in history that tech has ignored LOUDLY.
The silence, when not outright complicity in the tech sector reminds me of this holocaust quote:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
—Martin Niemöller (source: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/martin-niemoeller-first-they-came-for-the-socialists )
As Aaron Bushnell said, many of us like to ask ourselves, “What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?”
The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now. Anyone who shrugs to what is happening in Gaza ghetto now also would shrug witnessing what happened in Warsaw ghetto.
The "socialists" is from the 1950s US poetic version of Niemöller's confession of 1946:
... the people who were put in the camps then were Communists. Who cared about them? We knew it, it was printed in the newspapers. Who raised their voice, maybe the Confessing Church? We thought: Communists, those opponents of religion, those enemies of Christians—"should I be my brother's keeper?"
So most other countries have the poetic version as "First they came for the communists ..."
They have targeted academics and medical professionals so it’s not surprising if they’ve been targeting IT professionals as well. Their main aim is to make sure that Gaza is not able to get back in its feet when the military onslaught is over.
Another flagging to silence, as it was with many other news. Why not this one too? It was not looking like the community was particularly concerned about those. Now the jobs these people did might be similar to what this community does, but if you are not willing to see the despair of children with no family, or of people who are starving while food rots across border, how could we expect us to understand this; because one person was using vim as much you were using? I hope none of us are targeted by our resume. Meanwhile we can just ignore this, just as we were ignoring it in the past.
So the development that the IDF is targeting non-combatant tech workers is flagged because, per your link, "The issue is how often to have a thread about it". Tech workers being targeted is not considered a new topic because there was already enough talk about Gaza before this news. The news that civilian tech workers (including YC members) are now targeted is not distinct - it's all "Israel attacks Gaza" and that's already been covered to exhaustion, is how I interpret your link.
I don't think that's a sensible reading of the (voluminous) moderator explanations on how such stories are handled. You can make an argument for the importance of any story - some people would like to read a story on HN about some other important conflict or the gut biome or async Rust every single day but clearly a messageboard with 30 front page slots can't accommodate all those needs at once nor would it be an interesting place. So there has to be some sort of way to balance these things.
The link explains (again, at about as much length as you have patience for - these discussions have been going on for years) how this works on HN - you have to take at least some of that stuff in and engage with it, if you want to advocate for some sort of change. Being offhandedly reductive about it or explaining how this one thing is actually really important is not that.
I don’t think you are wrong, but I think it is both sad and pathetic. This genocide is currently on month 6, the situation gets more and more dire every day. There is an imminent famine—if not already started. We get news that Israel is using AI to conduct this genocide, that tech is flowing to Israel to conduct this genocide, that some of our industrial comrades are complicit, that some of our industrial comrades that speak up get fired[1], and now some of our industrial comrades are being targeted and becoming martyrs in this genocide.
We get all this news, but we cannot talk about it because there was a thread a couple of weeks ago which talked about journalists being targeted[2].
This is an ongoing catastrophe, and we need to have an ongoing conversation about it. When new information is reviled we need to have a conversation. As a forum popular in our industry HN needs to own up its societal responsibility. There is a lot of tech being used in this genocide, and as workers in tech, we should know our part. As long as this genocide continues, we cannot stop talking about Gaza
I don't think that's particularly responsive, to be honest - it's an argument the story is important but I doubt any reasonable person disagrees with that.
This is an ongoing catastrophe, and we need to have an ongoing conversation about it. When new information is reviled we need to have a conversation.
Little of what has happened in the... I think 3? gigantic threads that have been on HN about this qualifies as 'conversation' so there's that enourmous problem, given the remit of the site. And just as importantly, 'we need to have a conversation' is not a meaningful practical approach for obvious reasons, about any topic in a limited space. The case needs to be made more specifically and probably addressed at someone who can take it into consideration which would be hn@ycombinator.com
The reality is that while this site has come to be a major "town square" for tech folks, it exists for its own specific purposes that are not aligned with tech workers organizing toward ensuring our mutual safety and well-being. Of course we're free to use this site as we like rather than embrace its self-described purpose, which is often enough compatible with its moderation standards, but that conflict grows.
As dang once said early in ChatGPT's hype, if AI were good enough to generate the insights brought from conversation here, at as good or better a level than humans are able to, he'd consider replacing the open forum with AI generated content. Because it would serve the purpose of the site, which is not community.
> We don't know yet how the current AI wave is going to play out on HN but for the time being the community is super sensitive about not letting generated content permeate the threads and I think it's the right call for now.
I’m not sure what you mean. They compiled a list of technology specialists and concluded that there was enough evidence there to claim that IT experts are being targeted. The list includes names such as Haitham Muhammad Al-Nabahin. If you want an independent verification that he was indeed killed, and a prominent programmer, here is a news link[1] published the day before this report. You can do the same for e.g. Tariq Thabet[2].
The people on the list compiled by Euro-med HRM were all killed by the Israeli army in its ongoing genocide in Gaza. It doesn’t matter how biased the source is, the list is still there full of martyrs, each one of them experts in the IT industry, and no doubt some of them even with accounts here on HN which they leave behind.
> It's exactly the sort of thing countries at war do
It's not, usually armies do not target civilians, and especially not civilians upper class (which devs are in Gaza). For multiple reasons, but one of those was very clear in Ukraine: if they killed Chernobyl's keepers, or Zaporiga's engineers, this would have led to troubles.
Civilians can absolutely be targeted if it fills a legitimate military objective. And Hamas doesn't follow the rules of war and doesn't distinguish between civilians and military objectives either. It's like how Hamas and Hezbollah both use journalists as spotters and then complain when they get killed. Communications networks are 100% legitimate targets and so are the people maintaining them.
I wouldn’t necessarily say there is a bias, or at least not a bias which favors Israel directly, as submissions which favors Israel’s narrative gets flagged as quickly (probably even quicker). However I think the bias here is over sensitivity (as in signal theory) or an over abundance of caution. This is not good when the subject matter is an ongoing genocide and targeting of our comrades in tech.
As tech workers it is heart breaking to see our community staying silent when some of us are being targeted and martyred in a genocide. HN needs to do better.
A pretty effective genocide and cleansing campaign. Bomb crowded camps, target valuable people who glues the people together, doctors, academicians, engineers. Watch the society disintegrates.
Moderators. This needs to be unflagged. It is highly relevant to HN. This is a list of people within our industry who have now been martyred in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. There are dozens of names on this list, some of these martyrs may even leave behind accounts here on HN.
> There are dozens of names on this list, some of these martyrs may even leave behind accounts here on HN.
Early in the current Gaza siege, a few months ago, IIRC, there was a Palestinian programmer taking part on the discussions here on HN. I don't see her posting here anymore. Hope she is still alive.
> Captain Ernest Medina told his men that nearly all the civilian residents of the hamlets in Sơn Mỹ village would have left for the market by 07:00, and that any who remained would most likely be VC or VC sympathizers. He was asked whether the order included the killing of women and children. Those present later gave differing accounts of Medina's response. Some, including platoon leaders, testified that the orders, as they understood them, were to kill all VC and North Vietnamese combatants and "suspects" (including women and children, as well as all animals), to burn the village, and pollute the wells.[23] He was quoted as saying, "They're all VC, now go and get them", and was heard to reply to the question "Who is my enemy?", by saying, "Anybody that was running from us, hiding from us, or appeared to be the enemy. If a man was running, shoot him, sometimes even if a woman with a rifle was running, shoot her."
> "A sweep operation was conducted recently… Crazy American enemy used light machine guns and all kinds of weapons to kill our innocent civilian people in [My Lai]. Most of them were women, kids, just born babies and pregnant women. They shot everything they saw. They killed all domestic animals. They burned all people’s houses. There were 26 families killed completely – no survivors… The American wolf forgot its good sheep’s appearance."
> "The only crime I have committed is in judgement of my values. Apparently, I valued my troops’ lives more than I did the lives of the enemy." -- William Calley, ‘C’ Company lieutenant
Even though innocent brothers and sisters in tech are being slaughtered now, I expect this thread to be flagged and locked within minutes... It is already flagged off the front page.