Top UN legal investigators conclude Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza

Why is this posted on a tech news site?

I don't understand this complaint. Are you the editor of this site?

From the guidelines:

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics... unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Because Israel is a part of the tech news cycle.

I wonder the same. It’s odd to see it still here given the low quality of the discussion. And it is flooded by mischaracterizations, misinformation, and one-sided hyperbolic takes. I wonder what the right space or format is to have debates like this but in an effective way, rather than sides trying to win.

However dismayed you are by the low quality of the discussion, I promise you it bothers us even more. It's awful.

Not only that but whenever a thread like this appears, tomhow and I end up spending all day on it, which is by far the worst part of the job. I don't mean to complain—that would be grotesque, given the suffering that's going on—but rather to say how much easier it would be if HN did not discuss this or similar topics at all.

But I don't think that's an option. It wouldn't be consistent with the values or the mandate of this site as I understand them, and it's our duty to try to be as true to those as we can. I want to be able to look back and say we did our best at that, even though the outcomes are this bad. I tried to explain this in a recent thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44403787, though I don't know how successfully.

The upshot is that there's no good option and no way out. Maybe experiencing that is the best we can do to honor what's happening. It feels congruent with the situation being discussed, albeit in the trivial form that everything on an internet forum takes.

Do you truly think that this news story is showing “some interesting new phenomenon”?

I am not one to talk as an Israeli Jew who clearly disagrees with the entire bullshit premise of the article… but either way, the story is only saying things that people have been (incorrectly) claiming for months

Serious question:

Firstly, have you ever thought about the fact that one, posts like this alienate Israelis from one of the few remaining tech news sources which made them feel safe by excluding politics? (If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, in 2023, I realised that I could no longer read The Verge due to pervasive and horrendous misinformation about Israel on a tech news site)

Secondly, given the havoc that posts like this cause and that it appears to not meet any of the rules for posts on Hacker News (clearly not tech or programming related and quite frankly, no more interesting to any person in tech than any other person), why do you allow this post to still exist?

Habr, the russian speaking HN-alike, was "outside of politics" too. That didn't end well for either Habr or posters there. For large issues like this, abstinence is complicity.

Obviously we moderators are not present in the region, nor are we experts on the topic. That applies to almost every story that appears on HN. The “some interesting new phenomenon” is that – according to the title – ”top UN legal investigators” have made this finding. That's what we call "significant new information" about this topic. It's not for us to judge whether this finding is accurate or not; as I said, we're not there, we're not experts. But the discussion thread allows abybody with any particular knowledge on the topic to share their perspective.

> saying things that people have been (incorrectly) claiming

In your opinion, is there a neutral organization in the world that could define whether the legal definition of genocide is being met or not?

Thank you for your service and not taking the easy way out. It means a lot.

Try taking a look at Stack Exchange (Stack Overflow for other things than programming) - it's not perfect of course, but IMO the site's format promotes cold arguments.

HN has never been exclusively a site about tech: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. There are inevitably some stories with political overlap, though we try to prevent them from dominating the frontpage. I've gone into this in detail in other comments in this thread, with links to past explanations:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45267159

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45269414