Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47576084 and please don't post so aggressively. I'm sure you don't intend to, but it has a strong negative effect on HN threads, and we're trying for something different here.
You may not feel you owe $BigCoEmployee better (though chances are, said person is just as much a community member here as you and the other users slamming them are), but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
GP did not personally attack or denigrate the person they were replying to.
As the dozens of other comments show, the overwhelming majority of us do not believe the root commentors claims, and this PM quite objectively does not have the leverage and authority to back their claim that they won’t let this happen again.
It’s hard not to read your conception of “trying for something different” as granting undue credulity to a transparently dishonest corporate actor.
I understand, and I don't want to see ads in such contexts either. But "nobody believes this" is of course a personal attack, and "you don't have the power to [do what you just said you will do]" is pretty aggressive too.
The impulse to hit back against what is perceived as a "transparently dishonest corporate actor" is natural and human. I feel it also, and in fact my first response when I read such comments is always an adrenaline surge and the peculiar pleasure-hit of righteous indignation. So yes, I know where these feelings are coming from; we all do.
The problem is that in the HN context, (1) there is a human being at the other end of the account being attacked, and (2) there are orders of magnitude more attackers. In practice, this can easily turn into a mob dynamic and in fact a mass beating, if a virtual one. That's bad in its own right and bad for the community here.
I would say that "nobody believes this" would usually be a personal attack by default but when it's followed up with "you do not have the power to prevent it" it's not a personal attack.
> The impulse to hit back against what is perceived as a "transparently dishonest corporate actor" is natural and human.
Honest question: If we agree that the transparent dishonesty and the lynch mob behavior are both undesirable, how do you think the two should be balanced in operative terms?
I don’t want to put words in your mouth — but are you saying you won’t allow direct pushback to dishonest corporate actors??
My view is that healthy discourse requires balance and proportionality: flagrant dishonesty, as is the case here, should license a proportional degree of pushback.
I don’t agree at all that “nobody believes this” is quite the personal attack you’re making it out to be, but I don’t care to debate that at length either.
(1) the long-term health of the community has to be the priority here. Otherwise it won't survive—all the default internet vectors point the other way;
(2) it's possible to push back, express skepticism, etc., in way that respects the person on the other side of the conversation and isn't just venting the impulse to shame the other.
You guys (<-- by which I really mean all of us in this community) need to remember that you're not just addressing a $BigCo abstraction when you post replies to someone else's comments. You're talking to an individual human. Sure, they may be working for a large and powerful company; but in the HN context the power dynamic is actually quite the reverse. If you put yourself in their shoes for a minute, it shouldn't be so hard to recognize that.
Like I said upthread, I agree with you on the underlying issue. But we also have to preserve the container, and the latter has to take precedence.
At the end of the day, if you want intellectual curiosity and openness, bad-faith dishonesty needs to be weeded out; thought-provoking and honest conversation should be promoted, regardless of where the contributor is employed.
The problem isn’t working for Microsoft. The problem is dishonesty.
You’re treating the root comment with kid gloves because it’s from a Microsoft employee. Please don’t do that.
Internet commenters massively over-attribute "bad-faith dishonesty" to others while denying it in themselves. There's enough bad faith to go around in all of us.
It's obvious that the dominant variable in the GP was that he was replying from within $BigCo. Your comment starts out by denying that and ends by confirming it.
I'm not asking for special treatment for anyone, but the opposite: I don't anyone on HN to be the target of a mob. That's the entire point.
Please don't attack people for showing up to engage in discussion like this. I'm sure you don't intend to, but it quickly becomes part of mob behavior. We don't want that on HN for obvious reasons, and I'm sure nobody intends it, exactly, but it happens all too easily anyhow.
I appreciate the reply. As mentioned, it happens unintentionally. One way to describe the (desired) HN community is everyone learning together how to avoid unintended effects.
This subthread was originally in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47557437 before we merged the threads. (I mention this because otherwise the bit about archive links doesn't make sense.)
Dang, can we post topical Ukrainian news stories now? Because it wasn't allowed for so long and all the strong wording around it not being allowed most people have probably given up, but it would be good to know if the seemingly new policy applies to all conflicts now or just Gaza/Iran seeing as you are now un-flaging conflict related threads.
Ukraine has been my pet war for years now. I never got this sense. It just needed to have a novel technological or geostrategic angle to make the front page. "Russia is being evil" didn't usually meet that threshold because it's not news, just colouring in between the lines.
The doctor is named in the article now, perhaps as part of a later edit.
Since people are questioning the objectivity of the other domain, we'll use this link you found for the merged thread. I'll put the original link in the top text.
> Naming the doctor adds nothing. It’s a doctor from Gaza with an Islamic name, and presumably at a hospital in an area controlled by Hamas
All of this requires substantiation. Without it, a named medical professional rendering a medical opinion is credible.
> how can such claims accepted without more scrutiny?
What does "accepted" mean in this context? I'm forming a personal opinion. Based on the preponderance of evidence–evidence you'll see, in this very thread, I was earlier sceptical of–it looks like serious people are putting their names to the opinion that this toddler was tortured.
> Without it, a named medical professional rendering a medical opinion is credible.
That’s your opinion. I disagree. It’s not credible, because being a “professional” does not mean you are capable of ignoring your own biases, especially when they run deep as they do in this particular conflict. I’ll also point out that the medical opinion you’re referring to lacks any actual details. For example - if the injuries are consistent with a cigarette burn, what specifically makes it “consistent” and how does this medical professional differentiate this possibility from all the other ones? Why is anything substantial conveniently omitted from all these stories, which instead all use the vague phrasing of “consistent with”? Why are there no details on this doctor, where they practice, or their credentials anywhere?
That's fair. For what it's worth, we need more polls that have a ESH option for Israel and Palestine, because my patience with both sides in this has basically run empty.
> what specifically makes it “consistent” and how does this medical professional differentiate this possibility from all the other ones?
I'm not a medical professional. Another medical professional would need to disagree with the findings for this to rise to meriting attention again.
> Why are there no details on this doctor, where they practice, or their credentials anywhere?
They gave a name. Are you claiming they're a fake doctor?
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