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This is the counter argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iran_massacres

Here's hoping the regime is destabilised enough to topple by itself.


How is this in any way a counter argument to the US bombing a school? That their own government would stoop to such lengths gives free reign to foreign governments?

The idea is that incurring a few hundred civilians deaths to liberate Iranians from a regime that slaughtered them by the thousands or tens of thousands is a net positive for human life. Of course this only works as a justification if the Iranians actually are liberated front their regime, which I don't think they will.

But the justification, if the liberation actually transpires, is sound. An order of magnitude more French and Dutch died at the hands of Allied bombing and shelling in 1944. I think most agree the the upside of being liberated from Germany makes the Allied landings a net positive, though.

But to reiterate, I really doubt the revolutionary guard is going to lose control of Iran.


This aligns with conversations I’ve had with Iranians. They really do believe that the ends justify the means here if they can destroy the regime.

Iranians abroad or Iranians in Iran?

Because the ones abroad don't have a lot to lose and much to gain. The ones in Iran have a lot to lose as well.


Like being killed if they said they want regime change.

Congratulations for rediscovering Machiavelli. “The ends justify the means” is such a winning philosophy.

The ends do alter the acceptability of the means. E.g. if I offered you the means of “pay money to flip coin to make money as many times as possible” and the numbers involved were $50k if heads, lose $1k if tails and $50 buy in that’s way different if the numbers involved were $1k if heads, lose $50k if tails and $500k buy in.

If you can’t alter your reasoning to include outcomes then you will make poorer decisions.


> Of course this only works as a justification

If killing those kids was instrumental in a greater good, only then is it worth being philosophical about. From what I've seen, they were too eager with the bang bang boom boom to actually double check that it was a valid target.


Double checked?

They fed ancient intelligence into an AI which spit out a target list that nobody seems to have checked, period.


The situation is hardly comparable.

The French and Dutch were members of the Allies, with Charles de Gaulle as leader of the Free-French forces and Queen Wilhelmina the head of the Dutch government-in-exile, both in London. Both wanted the allies to get the Germans out of their countries.

There is no government-in-exile calling for the bombing of Iran as a method for liberation.

Just as Laos did not call for the US to drop some 2 million tons on that country - more than were dropped on Japan, Germany and Britain during World War II - resulting in the deaths of over 200,000 people, as part of the US's ineffective attempt to "liberate" North Vietnam.


No one wants to liberate Iran. Israel just wants to continue committing genocide and apartheid without any opposition. Iran arms Hezbollah and Hamas, the main forms of Palestinian resistance. The whole point of this operation is to decimate those groups so ethnic cleansing can continue without any resistance. Israel could care less about the Irani people.

You are very naive if you think the IRGC truly killed 10's of thousands of it's own people. Israel openly talks about Mossad organizing and supporting the coup, and good old Donny has admitted they have given weapons to organized resistance.

I estimate that many of the death numbers come from armed resistance being killed by the IRGC, not ordinary peaceful protestors. I also think armed resistance killed many Irani citizens. There is obviously fog of war here. The thousands of deaths were likely inflated and obfuscated.

Look at the coups we have backed in the middle east (including formerly in Iran which is what originally led to the Islamic revolution) -- and you will see a pattern. Both US and Israel provide material support to groups like ISIS or actors like Bin Laden. An Al-Qaeda fighter is literally the head of Syria now thanks to Israel.

I don't love Hamas, IRGC or Hezbollah, I don't like their ideology. But it is myopic to think they exist in a vaccum.


I wouldn't personally do so, but arguably those tens of thousands rest at our feet considering the current government was political blowback from the US and UK regime changing Iran back in the '50s.

It's even less likely to work because Trump has already claimed, publicly, to arming the protestors. That already makes any regime change illegitimate. They're all foreign backed agitators.

I bring it up because this shit is messy.


[flagged]


> Accidents are common in war

That's precisely why you don't just start wars to show the world that your dick is still bigger than everybody else's.


> Accidents are common in war;

As an engineer a substantial amount of my professional effort is spent on preventing them. They aren't acceptable.


Nobody is saying they are acceptable. But it'd be naive to say there's ever zero risk. What's your brilliant plan? Let Iran have nukes?

> Nobody is saying they are acceptable.

Saying "Accidents happen in war" is absolutely a way of saying "Accidents are acceptable in war".

That's what's being said here. Otherwise, it's a useless thing to say.

> What's your brilliant plan? Let Iran have nukes?

There was no evidence that Iran was pursuing nukes. Certainly no evidence that they were `n days` away from getting nukes.

My "brilliant" plan would have been the negotiations that were happening where Iran agreed to pretty strict monitoring and stipulations on nuclear fuel development.

The "Iran was getting nukes" rhetoric needs real evidence that was actually happening not "we think that might be happening because Trump said so."


> Saying "Accidents happen in war" is absolutely a way of saying "Accidents are acceptable in war".

Bridges fall down sometimes. I don't think it's acceptable. It's a statement of fact. There are always going to be mistakes, in every field and in pursuit of every goal. Your objection and implications aren't particularly charitable here.

> My "brilliant" plan would have been the negotiations that were happening where Iran agreed to pretty strict monitoring and stipulations on nuclear fuel development.

Iran was not complying with the monitoring requirements.

> The "Iran was getting nukes" rhetoric needs real evidence that was actually happening not "we think that might be happening because Trump said so."

Intelligence agencies under both Biden and Trump (and since at least the 90s) have repeatedly confirmed it.

This isn't really a question or doubt any reasonable person can have. There can be an argument about how close they are at any given moment, but they are actively pursuing nuclear weapons.


> Intelligence agencies under both Biden and Trump (and since at least the 90s) have repeatedly confirmed it.

Cite your source. When did this happen under Biden?



These kinds of accidents seem to be particularly common in wars waged by Israel for some reason.

> Accidents are common in war

Sure. The point is this was a particularly tragic accident. And it happened for, from the looks of the ceasefire conditions, jack shit.

More pointedly: if it was an accident, it should be investigated. Honestly. Openly. Not only is it horrible, bombing children is a strategic blunder in a war for hearts and minds.


[flagged]


The school was bombed by US Tomahawk missiles, twice via a double tap so the medical personnel were killed too.

It's absolutely absurd to think this would be caused by a misfire from Iran.


Investigation isn’t finished, but it was almost certainly the US. If it was Iran Trump or Hegeseth would not have been able to contain themselves.

The American commander in chief was, as of yesterday, vowing to end their entire civilization.

i dont imagine spending a bunch on the military and oil is nearly enough to topple the US government.

what case does it make that the constitution needs to be abandoned?


Aside from the fact that the events you linked to have no connection whatsoever to why the US started attacking Iran, there is absolutely no reality or moral code in which "a government kills a couple hundred of its citizens" justifies another government on the other side of the world blowing up a hundred plus schoolchildren and other civilians.

> Here's hoping the regime is destabilised enough to topple by itself.

It's looking like this is the exact type of magical thinking of the most useless "president" ever. Meanwhile in the real world, such things take hard work.


The counter argument is missing some justification. Is it reasonable to go killing people on the hope that something good will come out of it? Is there no less violent way to achieve those objectives? Do we really think that people will organize a toppling while they're being bombed without Internet access? Do we think they'll topple the current regime for one that is less antagonistic to Israel and the US after the bombings?

> This is the counter argument

When the French helped us during the Revolutionary War, they didn't shore bombard the colonists' kids because it would have been bad and counterproductive.


This is black propaganda, not a counterargument.

At most there were a couple thousand casualties from violent riots that involved armed gangs (or sleeper cells if you want to go that route).

There were not "60,000" peaceful protestors executed by the government, as Trump claimed yesterday without evidence. That is murderous propaganda, blood libel intended to deflect from the actual mass murder of civilians by American forces e.g. the Minab school.

It was a narrative specifically designed to induce comments like yours.


I suppose months is better than weeks. The world's still not recovered from the last such tech used by millions of developers.

I don't think anyone who used Claude code on the terminal had anything good to say about it. It was people using it through vs code that had a good time.

I have used Claude Code in the terminal to the tune of ~20m tokens in the last month and I have very little to complain about. There are definitely quirks that are annoying (as all software has, including vs code or jetbrains IDEs) but broadly speaking it does what it says on the tin ime

I prefer using it via the terminal. Might be anchoring bias, but I have had issues with slash commands not registering and hooks not working in the plugin.

On the contrary the average person in 1969 also thought that the moon missions were a waste of time and money: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02659...

This thread is pretty much how people felt back then too.


Depends on your work flow.

I find that for human in the loop Gemini beats both.


Been my experience as well, but generally the anti-Google sentiment here is pretty loud so you'll never see anyone praising Gemini here pretty much

Some of that, sure. But realistically, a lot people are just don't want to pay for every frontier model provider out there as they're released. Not just money, but also time trying them out. (Recommend people at least try out their multimodal model.)

It doesn't help that Google offers a bunch of confusing plans in multiple places. I ended up just pasting all their AI plan URLs, at least that I could find, into Claude so I didn't have to figure it out.


I pay for Google Workspace, so pretty much the Gemini Pro included with that suffices my use case. I can't say it will work for everyone, but I do use it for random tasks - all the way from wood working to building complex software projects, and so far I've rarely hit the limit too.

What Gemini Pro comes with Workspace? Is there api allowance? Different than free users?

I guess if you choose the business standard, you get "Pro access to features & models with enterprise-grade security & privacy"

https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/getting-started...


It says "Gemini App" but I am not sure what it's referring to.

I guess it's access to Gemini, because that's the plan I'm on and you can access Gemini using gemini.google.com or their phone app (Android/iOS). I couldn't find information on the API, maybe it's on that page, but I couldn't find it from my phone browser. Anyway, I use OpenRouter pretty much, so I have no idea if the API is part of my plan.

Thank you.

I think Antigravity w/Gemini is a great product; it's been super useful on a bunch of my hobby projects. It's especially wonderful when writing firmware and needing to add support for a new chip. I can point it at a PDF datasheet and it'll do a much better job of reading it and parsing out all of the register fields than anything else. Saves me enormous amounts of time.

Thanks, been meaning to try it. I heard the limits on that is an issue and people are supposedly blowing the limits off way too easily? How has your experience been so far in this regard?

Is anti-Google sentiment still pretty loud? People seem excited about Gemini catching up + Gemma 4

Yeah, in most threads you will see anyone recommending Gemini be downvoted. Ironically, Gemini (with Workspace subscription) is the only model that explicitly states it doesn't use your inputs to train their models right under the chat box. AFAIK no other provider does that explicitly - usually there is a hidden toggle in settings you will need to turn off.

The corporate subscription for ChatGPT says the same thing. And I would be shocked if it wasn't the same for a corporate agreement for Claude.

TIL. That's cool. I mostly use Gemini 3 Flash for some background jobs because of the price/perf, but rooting for their models to improve. Competition is good.

The catch: If you don't pay any subscriptions to Google, they will use your data for training their models. Agreed on competition being good.

Google does not know how to sell.

They have multiple offerings, they probably will kill some of them very soon. There is no reason to waste your time and money on Google.


I pay for both ChatGPT and Gemini.

I've finished (as in: it's done, it works, and I may never need to change it again) entire projects with ChatGPT and Codex. Sometimes it takes a lot of hand-holding to get there, but it does get there and (with the exception of 4o) it's been improving since the beginning.

In contrast: I can't even get Gemini Pro to give me any answers to the most primitive questions that aren't caked in prima facie lies without at least 4 interactions, in any context, ever. The output is consistently and ridiculously garish with its insessant self-contradictions. It seems to be impossible to actually get anywhere with it.

What am I doing wrong here?


> I implemented it in a real operating system. Your toy OS is best left to brain dead enterprise programmers who can't edit a config file to save their lives.

If America was near full employment you'd be seeing real wage growth. Something that's not existed since the 1970s.

> real wage growth. Something that's not existed since the 1970s

Real wages are 15% higher than they were in 1979 [1].

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q


That is not hourly earnings. Americans are working longer than they did in 1970.

On top of that even if we take your link at face value that's a 0.35% growth per year. The medieval warm period had faster wage growth.


> That is not hourly earnings

Hourly earnings (nominal) have grown at 3.2% per year between 2006 and 2025 [1]. Inflation in that interval was 2.7% [2].

> Americans are working longer than they did in 1970

Source? These data show hours worked are down [3].

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES0500000003

[2] https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1&year1=200601...

[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=18H2H


If you look very carefully you can notice that 2006 is not 1970.

>Source? These data show hours worked are down [3].

https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2018/october/how-h...


Do you have the underlying data? I’m curious if per capita is being averaged across whole population or workers. If the former, that seems to penalize younger-aged countries.

And let’s not forget that single income households converted to dual income households, from 47% to 66% of married couples.

https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/america-has-becom...

(Not my favorite think tank but they have a nice chart.)


The real-wage data above aren’t household statistics.

Only because the inflation metrics don't include housing.

> Only because the inflation metrics don't include housing

Which price index are you looking at that doesn’t include housing?


Consumer price index is probably the most common one and it doesn’t include housing.

> Consumer price index is probably the most common one and it doesn’t include housing

Almost all BLS price indices, including CPI, include housing. (CPI measures the “rent of primary residence, owners' equivalent rent, utilities, bedroom furniture” [1].)

[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/cpi/concepts.htm#the-cpi-as-a-c...


Serves me right for asking AI.

Of course, CPI doesn’t capture whether people have roommates or have made other adjustments to keep their housing costs within income limits.


CPI-U is deceptive and misses the point entirely, cheap t-shirt and televisions don't matter when people can't afford healthcare or housing.

Honestly, even if that takes into account housing and everything, doesn't that seem... pathetic? All of the automation and technological advancement and productivity gains over the past 45 years, and average workers in the US see a measly 15% higher real wage over that timespan. Compared to the obscene (real) wealth increase by those at the top during the same span, this seems pathetic to me.

That we shouldn't take child rearing advice from the man who killed himself with fruit juice.

And to a good approximation all real world Rust uses unsafe everywhere.

So we now have a new code base in an undefined language which still has memory bugs.

This is progress.


No, this is false. For Rust codebases that aren't doing high-peformance data structures, C interop, or bare-metal stuff, it's typical to write no unsafe code at all. I'm not sure who told you otherwise, but they have no idea what they're talking about.

It's the classic "misunderstanding" that UB or buggy unsafe code could in theory corrupt any part of your running application (which is technically true), and interpreting this to mean that any codebase with at least one instance of UB / buggy unsafe code (which is ~100% of codebases) is safety-wise equivalent to a codebase with zero safety check - as all the safety checks are obviously complete lies and therefore pointless time-wasters.

Which obviously isn't how it works in practice, just like how C doesn't delete all the files on your computer when your program contains any form of signed integer overflow, even though it technically could as that is totally allowed according to the language spec.


If you're talking about Rust codebases, I'm pretty sure that writing sound unsafe code is at least feasible. It's not easy, and it should be avoided if at all possible, but saying that 100% of those codebases are unsound is pessimistic.

One feasible approach is to use "storytelling" as described here: https://www.ralfj.de/blog/2026/03/13/inline-asm.html That's talking about inline assembly, but in principle any other unsafe feature could be similarly modeled.


It's not impossible, it is just highly unlikely that you'll never write a single safety-related bug - especially in nontrivial applications and in mixed C-plus-Rust codebases. For every single bug-free codebase there will be thousands containing undiscovered subtle-but-usually-harmless bugs.

After all, if humans were able to routinely write bug-free code, why even worry about unsoundness and UB in C? Surely having developers write safe C code would be easier than trying to get a massive ecosystem to adopt a completely new and not exactly trivial programming language?


Rust is not really "completely new" for a good C/C++ coder, it just cleans up the syntax a bit (for easier machine-parsing) and focuses on enforcing the guidelines you need to write safe code. This actually explains much of its success. The fact that this also makes it a nice enough high-level language for the Python/Ruby/JavaScript etc. crowd is a bit of a happy accident, not something that's inherent to it.

Our experiences are different.

Good developers only write unsafe rust when there is good reason to. There are a lot of bad developers that add unsafe anytime they don't understand a Rust error, and then don't take it out when that doesn't fix the problem (hopefully just a minority, but I've seen it).


The parent comments references real world data from Google: https://security.googleblog.com/2024/09/eliminating-memory-s...

A month of war in the middle east.

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