> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

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

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anigbrowl 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The forensic reconstruction to this level of detail is novel and interesting, both for the methods deployed and for the likelihood that the half-life of unsolved war crimes appears to be decreasing.

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ycombinatrix 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is most certainly not something that is covered on TV news. Seems on topic to me.

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glenstein 12 hours ago | parent [-]

I think it also touches on issues of interest to the hn crowd (it's being reported on a YC-incubated platform!), and one especially unique things about the reporting is the spatial reconstruction of the scene, which is not a degree of detail you typically get, and limits the number of variations of interpretations possible.

I also think issues of censorship are very high on the list of topics of interest on HN and few topics are subject to more extensive censorship than reporting on events in Israel and Palestine.

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appreciatorBus 12 hours ago | parent [-]

Israel and Palestine is one of the most obsessively covered topics in every form of western media. All the more the reason it doesn’t belong on HN. I’ll grant that there’s a tech angle to this specific story, but past experience with such articles on HN is that they reliably devolve into endless repetition of fixed talking points on each side. No useful information or opinion is conveyed, just endless insinuation and infective.

Furthermore, there are handful of accounts who sole purpose seems to be to pump the HN feed full of Israel and Palestine. People who want so badly to talk about a single political topic should probably go to Bluesky.

	▲	glenstein 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I agree that Bluesky is a great place to go into more depth about it, and in many respects a better place than HN to get good discussion. But I think there's equivocation going on here. Framing it as "obsessive" is an attempt to shift away from subject matter toward an attitude of journalists or consumers, like it's borne of the same attitude as paparazzi. But I think it merits significant coverage not for that reason, but because it so frequently meets criteria for meriting journalistic attention. I agree that comment sections can be bad, but they aren't always, and to some degree I would rather trust moderation than suppress reporting on a topic of legitimate interest. You're exactly right that a lot of reaction is toxic and politicized, and sometimes the way that manifests is by trying to cook up rationales to suppress stories by flagging them. Out of respect for the concern you've identified, it would be a huge mistake to let politicization win by allowing politically motivated abuse of flagging.