I see that this post was flagged, I am curious why and hope we can discuss that. I had not heard of this group at Google nor the story of their arrest/termination, and I found the account to be interesting and worthy of a spot on HN.
back
4 comments
The Israel–Hamas war does not have much room for calm and intellectual discussion. Was there a specific angle or pov you are specific interested in?
The discussion is not about the war, it's about a bunch of tech employees getting fired. It should be relevant for a large chunk of this site's user base. It certainly does not break the rules in any way to warrant mass flagging.
"If you lock yourself CTO's office and refuse to leave, you will be fired"
I fail to see what is particularly compelling about this scenario, and why it warrants discussion. Are we trying to make it a norm to lock yourself in executive offices or something?
I don't find most of the submissions on this site compelling. That doesn't mean I flag them and try to have them removed. People can choose to just...not participate.
> Are we trying to make it a norm to lock yourself in executive offices or something?
Posting and discussing an article about something happening doesn't mean you condone the behavior it is describing. Should we just not be allowed to discuss any news over here? Or only news that fits one particular narrative?
So you lock yourself in executive room , what do you think will happen?
There isn’t anything intellectually interesting about this. It’s drama over a very long standing political lightning rod
It has been reported Israel is using AI to choose bombing targets. How is that not intellectually interesting or relevant to a forum about technology?
That article already had a huge discussion when it came out: 1418 points, 1601 comments.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39918245
And there have already been two big discussions about the Google protests, covering the employees' arrests and their subsequent firings:
Yes, so it's clearly quite relevant to this board.
Perhaps someone should spin up intellectuallyinteresting.ycombinator.com?
Not only are they using novel AI-driven target selection technology, they changed the 'acceptable collateral damage' from 0 to 25 civilians per fighter for the recent genocide, without adding humans to the analysis loop.
This is AI driven genocide and HN should be paying full attention.
I refer to this: https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
Purpose of flagging it to not have a discussion about this as it sheds a light about what is happening.
If you browse HN's recent history, you'll find that nearly every single "Google/Israel" related article that gained any traction has gotten flagged by readers. People are clearly abusing "flag" as a mega-downvote to bury discussions they don't want to see happening. Pretty sad. I don't have a strong opinion on this topic, but I don't think this is appropriate behavior here. HN's "flamewar detector" should be enough to quickly move these stories off the front page if they get too hot. Why also flag?
No, I flag them because, like this thread, 99% of comments are just political/social warfare and has nothing to do with technology. It's just an extension of the culture war. You can go on Reddit or Facebook or basically anywhere else on the internet to do your cultural warfare. Can we have a single place left where we don't fall into that pit?
Of course the protest is about technology -- it's about the provision of technology to governments who use that technology for war. Why wouldn't you expect the employees of these companies have a position on that?
Like a lot of people here, I have family who died in the Holocaust. It is highly likely that the camps they moved through were using tech supplied by IBM. Would it have been "culture warring" for tech employees circa 1938, to publicize the human rights abuses being enabled by their companies? Because that's what the people who support these protesters think is going on here.
When there's a genocide going on backed by the largest military power in the world, it should take up all the oxygen.
If you want to ignore it, just press "Hide" instead of "Flag."
Dang has to rescue pretty much every single Israel post as they are getting mass flagged to oblivion.
IMHO because of lot of HN supports social justice and protesting, and they are supportive of employees taking action against any company that is doing something that goes against their principles.
The people who are in support of social justice and protesting will want this article on the front page. Those who flagged it aren't in that category.