U.S. drone strike kills 30 pine nut farm workers in Afghanistan

Not that this isn't a tragedy (and/or mass murder depending on your viewpoint), but I don't think hackernews is the right venue for this.

Hackernews should try and keep to tech and away from politics or its quality will continue to degrade. For instance the comments here are mostly not saying anything that hasn't already been said a thousand times before (is this just outrage porn?).

> , but I don't think hackernews is the right venue for this

I would think the same, but then you’ve got things like project Maven which is very closely related to things like US drone strikes and which definitely deserves its place on HN. For example in this particular case, I’d be interested to know how the initial identification has been made from aerial views alone (I suppose they were based on aerial views) that those nut pickers were the bad guys (when in fact they weren’t): was it a manual recognition task? An automatic one? (i.e. image recognition).

Again, this pretty much looks like a false positive issue with great “chances” of having been caused by an automatic process, so it definitely has its place on HN.

I'd agree with you if a noticable proportion of the comments so far had any discussion of the technical aspects, but they don't. (Two out of the 40 comments could maybe be considered discussing the technical aspects and yours goes into the most depth)

I would agree, but there is a technological angle with the use of drones. Unfortunately it is certain to devolve into a political discussion.

Yeah, I left my comment before reading the rest of the conversation in here, you’re correct on that one

Why not?

Technology has consequences that are ethical issues because it has influence on the lives of real people.

If you create a technology that is used to abuse other people(like facebook spying or manipulating masses or the military invading other countries), you are responsible for it.

The quality of HN improves if the human side of technology and science is openly discussed.

If a drone kills 30 people it is not "porn". It is a very serious matter.

Would you call it outrage porn if those 30 people were from your family?

Maybe it's just rose colored glasses, but I used HN a few years ago, left and then returned recently. It seems when I was first using it, political stuff in general was discouraged and shut down pretty quickly than now, but of course, my initial sentence applies.