It’s an interesting look into HN.

Charitably, this is an astroturf that accumulated 200+ upvotes in about 20 minutes, which I suspect is highly irregular for HN. Along, with a very clear concerted effort to quickly downvote anyone pointing out this is isn’t HN. If this is the case, what is HN admin doing about it?

Less charitably, HN is not where hackers hang out anymore. The hackers have moved on and HN is now this.

Interesting how this highlights a philosophical conundrum here that I'm not sure I have the answer to that goes beyond just forums. Do people make the community, or do rules make the community? I can envision arguments for both sides.

Does it matter?

If HN gets invaded by people who want to discuss cooking and start submitting and upvoting cooking articles and HN turns into cooking discussion website? And once they get majority, they'll change the rules to make it exclusively about cooking.

It's still people, just different people. People who like cooking vs. people who like technology and startups.

There's no philosophical conundrum.

Do you want HN to be colonized by cooking people or not? That is the question.

I don't.

We need to stand our ground and repel colonizers who want to change the character of HN. Our unity is our strength.

People here prefer arguing about the rules (and alleged violations thereof) more than they do making concrete, substantive arguments.

The rules are made by people. So it’s just people all the way down…

It’s the interaction of the two.

That's because it is a cop out.

When talking about Israel, it's always couched in terms of universal human rights. When confronted with their lack of advocacy for the human rights of practically anyone else, their cognitive fallback is that they only care for what they feel the U.S. government is responsible for, and that it's not really about universal human rights, and never was. Then, when no one is paying attention anymore, they swing back to being avowed universal human rights activists who just happen to be condemning Israel.

They’ve been enshittifying for the better part of a decade. The model 3 launching without rain sensors and taking years to get any where near comparable with cameras comes to mind.

It still is not anywhere close with cameras. My guess is that it will not ever get better than it is today.

There has been much prognostication about the internet blackout but it misses the real issue. The internet blackout only works perfectly when there are no media backed journalists on the ground. The absolute absence of any reporting from foreign journalists on the ground anywhere in Iran is striking.

There was even some reporting from Tiananmen Square in 1989, and from Baghdad in 1991.

News media has ceased to be a meaningful investigative endeavor.

There are plenty of Western journalists in Iran, but they are subject to the same internet blackout as everyone else. Embassies can use satellite communications due to diplomatic immunity, while journalists are just average nobodies who face extra scrutiny due to their jobs.

I would be surprised if there many western journalists left in Iran…

Here is an excellent podcast from a Washington post journalist that was captured and held as a hostage - it’s called 544 days (that’s the amount of time he was jailed there)

https://crooked.com/podcast-series/544-days/

Why can't they use starlink?

Starlink is illegal in Iran. Being a foreign journalist is a huge red flag in totalitarian countries, making it harder to smuggle in illegal devices than for the average citizen or visitor. And because journalists are probably under surveillance by the regime, it's harder for them to obtain Starlink terminals in the country than for the average person.

> People were being paid for each act of violence they committed, by those spy agencies.

Do you have evidence of this? At least in the USA, mobs angry at the government will conduct arson and property destruction without being paid a dime.

TFA mentions one reason: the "recent Iranian law that would equate the use of Starlink with espionage, punishable by death"

Are there? It seems like an extremely dangerous place to do journalism.

It's depressing really. Unfortunately the business model for media companies isn't what it used to be.

These days, I think the business model is selling influence rather than selling subscriptions and generic ads.

Immediately when the blackout started an Iranian living abroad told me there will be a massacre. No journalists needed to know that but journalists do bring credibility to a claim. The tiny part of the population that is whitelisted is spreading lies, which doesn't help.

This is why god invented bone conducting headphones

That’s still not a shared experience.

> And the research was out there! Does everybody only read this single Harvard literature review? Does nobody read journals, or other meta studies, or anything? Did the researchers from other institutions whose research was criticized not make any fuss?

They did. But Ancel Keys, one of the bribed researchers, author of the infamous seven countries study that laid the groundwork against fat made it his life’s mission to discredit anyone who researched sugar. He effectively made the topic academic suicide. His primary target, that served as a warning example for others was his contemporary in the U.K. John Yudkin.

Because it's BS. The rules are secondary to someone's political agenda.

I agree. It's objectively nonsense with regards to AirPods and Apple Watches in particular. Both are extremely dominant in their respective categories for many years at this point. Objectively, Apple is not alienating its "long-time customers". Someone raging about his perceived wastefulness of AirPods is out of touch with the vast majority of people.

But people love to rage and be enraged on the internet. So anyone pointing the vacuity of the enraged is downvoted and cast aside.

America is founded on the principle of human selfishness. People are selfish, so let’s harness it instead of pretending that people are utopian selfless creatures.

More recently, selfishness has taken second seat to hurting the “other” (whatever other happens to be) even to the detriment of one’s own self interests. America is not built for this.

It could also just evolve ?

Maybe you don’t understand the role of the BLS or what it does. Maybe you’ve been sold a bill of goods that it is supposed to be an infallible oracle, when it is, in fact, a useful measurement device with limitations that have been well known for decades.