I think this is exactly it. Replit is a cheap and easy way to get an MVP off the ground ASAP. However, their audience is inherently hackathon attendees, not real businesses. Whether these can turn into real businesses (en masse to justify low churn and consistent SaaS ARR) or not is the real question.
“Terrorist sympathizer” and “successful businessperson” (or “rich person”) are completely orthogonal. Building a successful business does not necessarily change your terrorist sympathisation status. You can be a rich terrorist sympathiser.
I am not equipped to give an opinion on that either way. I’m just saying that building a successful business is independent of the accuracy of your ideology.
> these days anyone who says "I support Palestine Action"
They have a video of people from this group attacking police with sledgehammers. It is strange how much of this 'direction action' is harming Ukraine support and not Israel. If people wanted to support Palestine they can do it without attacking their own countries' military - which is not operating in Israel at all.
> "she was murdered by ICE"
They have a video of her being shot, pretty much needlessly. I'd say that should be manslaughter at a minimum.
"They have a video of people from this group attacking police with sledgehammers"
Do you have the name or names of the person accused of 'attacking police with sledgehammers'?
I've heard a lot about this, but it's difficult to get to actual sources about exactly what is alleged.
Even if this did happen as you say. attachking police with sledgehammers is assault, potentially even attempted murder. There's plenty of laws for that.
UK military is operating in Palestine (very frequent military flights from their post-colonial base in Cyprus), and is operating in Israel (when they were shooting down drones, etc.), and is supplying Israel with weapons (directly by soldier training and indirectly by allowing to use their military bases), and joined in international coverup (they have detailed intelligence on what Israel was doing in Gaza, which they never released publicly any part of).
Pretty solid basis for direct action.
If they provided this level of support for Russia, they'd be a new Belarus.
Equating surveillance flights off the coast with "operating in the country" is tenuous at best. If that's the threshold, Russian military is already operating in Britain (see Yantar's adventures).
The mental effort a lot of people has made to pretend they aren't entirely powerless and irrelevant for stopping Israel's crimes is deeply impressive. The reality is that there's nothing the UK can do to stop Israel as long as the US is supporting them (short of going to war with both the US and Israel), but this reality is at odds with the desire to do something, so people invent and inflate leverage where there isn't any. Moreover, most of the time the very same people oppose creating more leverage for the future, as your added qualifier of "post-colonial" implies. It's depressing.
Not direct intervention; but we fly sorties, provide intelligence, ship military equipment, build systems for... None of which we provide Israel for their current war.
It's just odd to me that Israel draws so much Ire when the UK deals with all sorts. There are many worse things happening that doesn't get a second of airtime.
It's fascinating to read how Hacker News helped make Replit successful. I hope everyone will try this tool! I wonder if Masad still scrolls here nowadays.
Are we still doing these kinds of lionizing puff pieces after SBF, Holmes, Musk and all the others? By now, I consider being featured in one a negative signal.
I think they are just hitting the consumer market hard. I have friends who have never coded & are using Replit. That said, not a single one of them has launched.
I can second this. I'm an online coding instructor and within our company Replit was the website/environment we were told to use with our students. I really didn't like it due to all the AI features (I believe that when you're learning to code you shouldn't use LLMs) but the collaboration features were really good.
Unfortunately they added a limit to the number of collaborators per account and we had to stop using it.
Of all the tools I try and review, replit remains to be simply the worst in my opinion. I struggle to do anything useful with it except trivial hello world type of stuff. The bubble is real.
It is not political; I did not know the owner had political opinions. I started using Replit before it had AI, had some ideas and they gave me a free year of AI last year when I complained it is so far behind the rest. And imho, it still is.
Like the other comment here: I just have much better outcomes with the same prompts with other tools. That is all I meant to say.
Reading through this piece and all I can think of is how he's just the other side of the same coin. Simply a different color of the same elitism that our world is moving into as money concentrates and starts to meddle more and more with our political spheres while accountability slowly errodes to zero.
I found the piece rambling and incoherent, but I don't really see how this follows. This is an individual Jordanian founder who made a political statement. That's not really the same thing as the deep integration between the Israeli state, Zionist organizations, and big tech.
Both sides of...what? I'm confused. Is the idea "all these people have a lot more money than I think they'll ever need and it makes me mad"? Me too. Just don't see how it's relevant.
The idea is that as money gets so concentrated, so does real political power. And with that concentration of political power comes extreme disregard for the opinions of the masses. I think it's a fair argument that the world has always catered to the will of rich people, but the difference now is that rich people are so unfathomably rich, and so much wealth is concentrated in so few.
> but the difference now is that rich people are so unfathomably rich...
Compared to when? How many times in history has wealth been less concentrated?
As far as I'm aware, for almost all of history post-agriculture, wealth was highly concentrated while the average person lived in abject poverty (think: kings vs peasants). The mid-20th century was an era of mass prosperity in the US and parts of Europe, but it was an anomalous few decades, not the norm.
> How many times in history has wealth been less concentrated?
Mostly all of them! There have been periods where inequality dropped, but mostly it's been rising since at least the 1300s. I'm on mobile and can't link research, but there are a few papers that investigate this.
> As far as I'm aware, for almost all of history post-agriculture, wealth was highly concentrated while the average person lived in abject poverty (think: kings vs peasants).
And yet it was less unequal than now, an era where we've managed to use technology to concentrate wealth at an unprecedented scale. No longer is the richest person you know the king who collects your taxes next door, now it's a SV trillionaire on the other side of the world.
More plainly on my part, though I'm worried sounds like berating when the comments are viewed consecutively: what does that have to do with the article we are discussing?
As the article mentions, Saudi Arabia is aiming to build its own deep integration with big tech, which Masad is enthusiastically participating in despite the Saudi government's own human rights issues. (He argues, quite conveniently if true, that the Replit tools he sells to the Saudi government won't be used for any of the bad stuff.)
This clarifies things, thank you. I've gotten the impression that Masad doesn't have a very coherent worldview so I doubt he has given this contradiction much thought.
What does "Zionist" mean to you? I honestly don't understand what it means when Israel has existed as a Jewish state for 76 years and seems likely to continue doing so for the foreseeable future.
Zionism is a political movement that perpetrates atrocities with the aim of removing jewish populations from other parts of the world and settling them in Palestine.
It consists mainly of christians. If you assemble ten random zionists most or all of them will be christians, not jews.
The podcast The Empire Never Ended has recently finished a rather good series on Meir Kahane, one of the most important influences on contemporary zionism:
interesting hearing his justification for working w Saudi but not Israel:
He says he would never work with Israel now. “I think it’s an illegitimate and criminal government,” he told me during our gun safety training. “I mean, [Benjamin] Netanyahu is a war criminal.”
When I pointed out that Saudi Arabia has its own abysmal human rights record, Masad drew a contrast.
“I just think about how Replit is going to be used. Like, Israel is actively committing genocide and ethnic cleansing, and if you sell to the government there, it’s possible that they’re going to use it for that,” he said, pointing to the country’s use of Microsoft cloud services to track Palestinians’ phone calls. (After an investigation by The Guardian, Microsoft said it disabled the services that made the tracking possible in September."
Seems like a silly excuse. If his concern is that Israel could use Replit for military purposes, then SA is perfectly capable of doing the same. And SA has - directly or indirectly - killed more people in Yemen than Israel has in Gaza.
I mean, if he was really consistent, he'd also not be operating a business in America, given America is responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent civilians (more than Israel and SA combined) in recent history.
I'd love to hear an argument for this being true that doesn't involve counting all of the deaths caused by Sunni-Shia sectarian violence in Iraq, suicide bombings in civilian markets, ISIS etc. as caused by America.
Well there's Vietnam, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya etc which would tally ~300k civilian deaths alone. Given the blatantly false pretences that America invaded Iraq under, and the sectarian violence that significantly flared post-Saddam, I don't see why you'd not want to involve Iraq in the stats?
I accept US responsibility for a great many of the civilian deaths caused in Vietnam. I don't accept US responsibility for Islamists of different varieties blowing up each other's markets and places of worship with weapons provided by Iran and Syria.
So you don't accept the fact that a lot of this sectarian violence flared after the toppling of Saddam, which was because of the US? And how many of the deaths do you attribute to the sectarian violence, as opposed to the direct actions of the US in the region?
That was caused by a power vacuum and US's intentional act to oust the Ba'ath Party, remove all control from a country and it will fall to chaos especially when blood feuds are involved .
After toppling Saddam Hussein the US took political control in the country and decided who got to decide what. The slaughter that followed was a direct and rather predictable result of this.
Am I in some weird alternative universe where Israel did not just engage in a genocidal campaign against a population of Palestinians that are descendants of refugees from their prior genocidal campaign? Israel just finished killing probably over a hundred thousand civilians. The displaced the majority of Gaza. They destroyed the vast majority of its hospitals and universities and public infrastructure. They killed foreign aid workers even after those foreign aid workers cleared their routes with Israelis. Israeli soldiers raped Palestinians on camera. Then those solders were celebrated on public Israeli television and by the Israeli government. Attempts to prosecute those solders resulted in punishment for the prosecutors.
Is Saudi Arabia a human rights violator? Yeah and so is a bunch of western governments. But no modern government comes close to the abuses of the Israeli government and Israeli military. This is the view of the free people of this world.
Not only there is not a good argument for considering 1948 war a genocide on Palestinians but there is a much stronger argument Arabs have tried to genocide Jews (especially to those who think who think there was a genocide in Gaza because of starvation as a weapon of war + intent):
1. In 1948 Arab forces besieged Jerusalem and they were starting to run out of food.
2. Azzam Pasha, General Secretary of the Arab League, famously threatened "a war of extermination and a momentous massacre", Fawzi al-Qawuqji, commander of the Arab Liberation Army said that "we will have to initiate total war. We will murder, wreck and ruin everything standing in our way, be it English, American or Jewish.". Hell, several have even extended the threats to not just the Jews of Mandatory Palestine, but to Jews of the Arab world as a whole, such as Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Said("if a satisfactory solution of the Palestine case was not reached, severe measures should be taken against all Jews in Arab countries.") or the head of the Egyptian delegation to the General Assembly, Muhammad Hussein Heykal("the lives of 1,000,000 Jews in Muslim countries would be jeopardized by the establishment of a Jewish state." ). As Matiel Mughannam, head of the Arab Women's Organization in Palestine put it in an interview with Nadia Lourie in January 1948, "The UN decision has united all Arabs, as they have never been united before, not even against the Crusaders.... [A Jewish state] has no chance to survive now that the `holy war' has been declared. All the Jews will eventually be massacred. " (See Benny Morris' 1948 for sources on all of these)
Typical hasbara whataboutism, equating a statement by one guy that may or may not have been said 70 years ago to a livestream slaughter we just witnessed, where more than 50% of Israelis say "not enough force was used", not just offhanded remarks by radical leaders, which there are literal gigabytes of from Israelis of all walks of life. Just open up any popular political figure's Twitter and you'll see the most horrific statements, and not just statements, but action.
It isn't whataboutism to point out a wrong claim. Which statement is "a statement by one guy that may or may not have been said 70 years ago"? I gave four. I have made no claims about the current situation (and there was also plenty of action in 1948).
My opinion on him shifted because along with Paul Graham, they're the only tech leaders who have stood up for Palestinians. I don't agree with Graham on everything either, but I've gained a lot of respect for him speaking out against Zionism. They're rich, but it still is difficult to go against the entire venture capital industry to do the right thing.
that quotes attributed to "investors," according to Masad. but some of the most heinous stuff people said to him is public: https://x.com/rabois/status/1943804360863232513 "your friends should have not raped murdered and killed kids."
Smartphone cameras didn't turn everyone into a professional photographer, but they did radically expand who can take usable photos, experiment, and occasionally produce something valuable without years of training
Pareto principle in action - smartphones are good enough for 80% of use cases. And so is AI for a lot of junior-level work.
The problem is, when there are no trainee and junior positions (and, increasingly, intermediate) being filled any more... there is no way for people to rise to senior levels. And that is going to screw up many industries hard.
Many industries have hit this without AI. One example is surveying: it used to be that you’d have a crew of survey techs moving around equipment and measuring reference points, a crew chief, and a licensed surveyor directing and signing off on them. Those techs and crew chief were the future surveyors, as licensed surveyor requires x years working under supervision.
Now there’s one or two guys out there with a total station and/or drone. You’ve gone from 10 techs/junior positions per surveyor to 1. The average surveyor is something like 60 years old and has no successor lined up.
That's research. Engineering would be programming, but well. Taking into account future maintenance concerns and so on. Seems like the software world doesn't do a lot of it.
Capacity planning, growth rates, algorithmic complexity (typically not to the point of designing new fundamental algorithms), durability, DR, eventual consistency, race conditions, schema design, systems architecture, instrumentation, statistics, sampling, more measurement, tech debt maintenance and pragmatism, online migrations, designing for five nines uptime ...
Programming is turning requirements into code with or without respect to these higher level criteria. The implementation detail.
"Engineering would be programming, but well" fits :)
So I got excited and used Replit because I heard about it in a Diary of a Ceo podcast. Spent days working on my project, it was working in their unique tech stack and when I did local git commits it locked some files and conflicted with their replit agent also doing git operations and got stuck in a loop where the fix was to do a git reset --hard and reset the state.
Unfortunately their tooling locks me out from doing that and I wouldn't get help from their team after asking twice and getting moved to several different support members of their team. They just ghosted me and so I left and took my business elsewhere. Doesn't seem like it was made for advanced users.
> Masad, 38, has felt obliged to speak out about Gaza ever since, calling out those in tech who, in his view, have supported Israel’s “genocide” of the Palestinian people.
This sentence would be better without the scare quotes. Something like "calling out those in tech who support what he views as a genocide."
It'd be nice if Israel would let UN fact-finding missionaries or other independent research teams into Gaza to find out (in addition to not barring and/or killing humanitarian aid workers)
It’s perfectly normal for militaries to have press restrictions in conflict zones, for opsec among other good reasons. No one bats an eye when Ukraine does it for example.
1. Ukraine’s media restrictions are virtually non-existent when compared to those enforced by the Israelis in Gaza, including the intentional bombing of media offices. Keep in mind that Hamas has repeatedly called upon Israel to allow foreign press and NGOs to visit and see what’s happening on the ground.
2. The Ukraine war is a conventional war between sovereign nations with standing militaries with equivalent capabilities (air force, anti-air defenses, armored vehicles, bomb shelters, etc). The Gaza genocide is an onslaught by a sovereign nation with a well equipped military against a militant group in a dense urban area. Leveling entire city blocks when fighting against an opponent that has no air force or anti-air capabilities is not only unimpressive, but also breaks the principle of proportionality.
1. It's pretty much the same - no press in dangerous areas unless invited and escorted by the military. The only major difference is that Ukraine is >1000x larger, and has safe areas far from any fighting where such press restrictions aren't needed.
2. You're making a bunch of separate accusations without connecting them to the topic at hand, which was press restrictions.
No, they’re not the same, and (2) is very relevant.
Let me reiterate: Ukraine is a sovereign nation with a sovereign military that has the ability to enforce restrictions within its own territory.
To bring your bad analogy more in line with reality on the ground, imagine if Ukraine was still part of/occupied by the USSR/Russia, and Russia enforced press restrictions across all of Ukrainian territory during a Ukrainian insurgency. However, in this theoretical USSR, Ukrainians did not get Soviet citizenship, and were under a total blockade.
> The only major difference is that Ukraine is >1000x larger, and has safe areas far from any fighting where such press restrictions aren't needed.
But Israel never allowed press into the strip, even during “ceasefire” periods - like right now! This implies that Israel is not somehow paternalistically concerned for press safety; it simply wants a media blackout.
So no, this “major difference” is irrelevant when comparing restrictions between the two conflicts.
I'm not sure what you're getting at. Universally, modern militaries don't like journalists wandering around near their assets.
> and Russia enforced press restrictions across all of Ukrainian territory
Your analogy isn't very different from reality. Russia does enforce press restrictions near military assets, including in occupied parts of Ukraine.
> However, in this theoretical USSR, Ukrainians did not get Soviet citizenship, and were under a total blockade.
That would seem very unfair, if Russia did it just because they're mean and not because this hypothetical Ukraine had launched tens of thousands of rockets at them. But I'm not sure what it has to do with press restrictions.
> even during “ceasefire” periods
The ceasefire was pretty much dead once Hamas attacked IDF soldiers in Rafah. Now it's just a lower-intensity conflict. Still not a great idea to have random journalists waltzing around and tweeting photos of military assets.
> it simply wants a media blackout
This is a funny explanation because there are millions of cameras in Gaza anyway, and this is the second most covered conflict (by metrics like article count) in all of human history. Not much of a "blackout" at all.
Alright, your good faith arguments have convinced me! To summarize:
On one side, two sovereign nations setting press restrictions in areas they control. Standard stuff.
On the other side, a genocidal state blockading a tiny strip of land for 20 years waging a campaign that has killed & maimed so many children that we have lost count unilaterally enforcing a total international media blackout. Also standard stuff.
Silly me, how could I even argue about this? It’s just so damn obvious! Sometimes, arguing with random anons on HN pays off :)
Gaza population September 2023: 2.3 million. Gaza population September 2025: 2.1 million.
Hamas casualties make up only a portion of palestinian casualties; palestinian casualties make up only a portion of excess deaths; excess deaths make up only a portion of total deaths.
The next census will be in 2027. No one knows the population until then.
It’s not clear that Hamas limits their counts to excess deaths. Even if they intended to, a lot of it is based on a web form, with not much validation besides basic checks that the person exists etc.
As with pretty much any conflict, there's a ton of uncertainly, and people shouldn't be recklessly speculating based on things like WhatsApp chats. Responsible casualty estimates would look more like Ukraine, where for example Zelenskyy said "tens of thousands" (one significant digit) were killed in Mariupol.
Estimates of birth that rely on the mid-2023 figure and deliberately ignore Israel's systematic dismantling of the health and food systems in Gaza and the drop in fertility levels.
>the casualty count that Hamas claims
The Gaza Health Ministry's count is widely regarded as an underestimate, but mostly by people who don't refer to it with a dogwhistling caveat.
I wasn’t going to reply but since you’ve been rescued from the flags: which “genocide scholars” think that in increase in population is possible during a genocide?
I figured it may have been because you decided to get informed about how genocides are identified by intent and not population deltas. But since you think a projection is the same thing as a census, that obviously isn't the case.
Regarding intent: if Israel intended to kill everyone in Palestine they’d nuke them, and not risk the lives of their children trying to ensure noncombatants are out of harms way in operations against Hamas.
I agree with you that it’s a genocide, but that is not universally accepted, so I think the scare quotes are OK. This article isn’t seeking to litigate the genocide in Gaza.
It's funny how when talking about Israël's wrongdoings, everything is just "allegedly". Facts already confirms genocide, but hey, they don't want to land in hot water.
What an interesting tile. Is the value of his AI company expected to overcome the 'terrorist sympathizer' allegation? Is this how it works always or just when the person is inside the present Overton Window?
Let's try Elon Musk then:
"He was called a 'fascist'. Now, his tech company is valued $1.5T"
“Terrorist sympathiser” doesn’t mean much these days. People call Ms. Rachel a “terrorist sympathiser” and “antisemite of the year” for not wanting kids to die or become amputees
All these things are so amusing. Amjad Masad dislikes Israel and is fine with Saudi Arabia. Palmer Luckey will spend his life doing rainman calculations on the angle of the car in Minneapolis. One is a “terrorist”, other is a “fascist”.
But you can tell it’s all motivated reasoning. Standing with your tribe. It’s not much of a matter of honour. It’s just flashing your banners.
In the end, they are wealthy, but they are just people. And they have all these things and why do I really care what Ja Rule has to say about the new cyclone.
I respect him for standing up for his people. It’s honorable, in my opinion. It would be dishonorable (and easy) to be a mercenary, profit-seeking individual with loyalty to no one but himself.
Everyone stands up for their people. Tribalism is the most primitive form of society. Standing for principle is harder because sometimes you have to speak against your tribe.
Yes, it would be dishonorable to be mercenary, but being a tribalist is merely the default position. We’re all so at some scale.
He and Paul Graham, truly are the only people speaking out against Zionism though. The rest of the VC industry is either staunchly pro-Israel or silent on the matter.
Going against everyone in your industry is contrarian. There are countless threads where Masad is attacked by mainstream venture capitalists and called "antisemitic" or "terrorist". Same with paulg.
That kinda depends on what questions the industry revolves around, doesn't it? For example, if I was once of the only vegetarian at YC, I don't think it would make me a contrarian. And it especially wouldn't if my background was of a Vegetarian-based religion.
A very good, albeit involuntary, reminder that in Silicon Valley your good or bad opinions and beliefs don’t matter as long as you’re a good vessel to multiply investment and add value to a billionaire’s already obscene wealth.
Trying to frame the violent expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland as just "Jews trying to live in their own homeland".. isn't working in 2026 and nobody needs to read the thoughts of a man who saw Cecil Rhodes as a kindred spirit.
No. Speak to Persian and Iraqi Jews about their expulsion.
You can also look up arab violence and laws against Jews at any time you like. When the belief system mentions fighting Jews at the end of time when the trees will reveal them (except the evil Jew loving tree, yes really) you tend to act on those beliefs.
You mean the well-documented terrorist operations by Israel against Jews in the Arab disaspora? The terrorist state started with terrorism and sustained through it.
The focus on a particular location is a religious one (in the scriptures there was a Jewish homeland before Israel or Egypt, and Israel is singled out because God told them to go), but it's also a selective one that ignores all the times God arranged for Israel not to be there; and crucially does not stop and wait for His opinion about the present. It is the most dangerous kind of religious opinion: one invented by us.
Herzl makes no religious argument, he is fairly close to an atheist. That’s why I mentioned people should read the book or a summary before commenting on the matter.
Of course there could be, and Hertzel writes about it explicitly - the idea that Jews need a homeland because antisemitism makes it impossible for them to live within another people.
In regard to religion itself, like the other post said, he couldn't really care less and even advocated for Jews to convert to Christianity at a time, seeing it as another solution to the discrimination they're facing: "I see myself as an average modern Jew and I'm not afraid from the idea of a formal conversion to Christianity. I have a son, and I'd prefer converting today and not tomorrow so that his membership will start earlier and I can save him from the troubles and discrimination he'll face as a Jew".
There are other groups that could claim the same: Romany/Gypsies would be a big one but no one seems to want to claim a North Indian homeland for them; Sikhs might be another.
"I don't believe in god but he promised me this land 3000 years ago" sums up Zionism pretty well, or "Jews aren't safe anywhere so let's create a state by wiping out and expelling the native population and make enemies of all our neighbors". It's such a laughably self-contradicting ideology
I recommend _Culture in Nazi Germany_ by Michael K Kater. [0]
The push for a Zionist state started and accelerated in the 1920s to the end of the 1930s. Most of the Jews that moved from Europe to Palestine, which was part of modern day Israel, were by the Zionists. Reason is because the only jobs at the time were farming so people would have to give up their current triad.
Number of these individuals actually supported fascism. Even after WWII the mind set was not that fascism was bad but poorly implemented. That mind set was shared by a number of Germans and Jews that moved to Palestine before Israel became a state.
It was not until the late 1960s that younger culture started to shift that mind set to fascism is bad.
If you think I am wrong about the summation of the book ... read it.
It's a hundred pages. If someone hasn't read it, or even a summary, they have little knowledge of Zionism. WW2 was far after the modern return of Jews to Israel.
I grew up in a very left leaning, pro terrorism household. I was absolutely wrong about what Zionism was - not a 'God promised me this because I'm special" as I was told but rather "racism means we need a homeland let's all go back to Israel".
You sound like you’re trying to collapse the term into a single definition based on one guy, which just doesn’t match the variety of people and motivations using it today. Christian white nationalists in the US are not calling themselves Zionist because “we need a homeland, let’s all go back to Israel”.
You might as well say that Republicans are the party that fought the Confederates and freed the slaves. It is not true today.
How does having a religious base state prevent bigotry and discrimination? Both are mutually exclusive.
In the world, Jews discriminate against Jews, Christians discriminate against Christians, Muslims discriminate Muslims, ... A religious state can only have one variant of religion that is deemed the right variation even though multiple variations exist.
The closest thing to a non bigot and discriminating state is one that is not built on religion but accepts other people and allows them to exercise their variation of religion.
Earth is the home land of humans not a politically divided territory.
> How does having a religious base state prevent bigotry and discrimination?
Jews are an ethnoreligious group. You can be an atheist and return to Israel if you want. 20% of the population is Arab, with more rights than most Arab countries, for example Arabs in Israel vote for Arab politicians that argue with other Arab politicians in the Knesset, in Arabic.
Likewise Druze are more protected in Israel than they are in the rest of the middle East.
> prevent bigotry and discrimination
Israeli Arabs have the same rights as Jews, Asians and Europeans.
"More rights than most Arab countries" lmao sure, just cause you keep repeating a slogan doesn't make it true, that's called propaganda, there's very systematic and well-documented racism towards anyone who's not a Jew
Please don't comment like this. It's not a substantive contribution to the discussion to tell us that you stopped reading the article, and it's generally fulmination or curmudgeonliness or a shallow dismissal or something else that's against the guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> “Should I wear a keffiyeh to the shooting range?”
I'll give the writer this -- they conveyed a lot of information in just one short first sentence. I read a bit farther, but it didn't tell me anything I couldn't already guess from that sentence.
replit is actually quite popular among teenagers and basically third world youngsters trying to spin off a service or a "product" of their own.
- i mean yes u cannot make money out of teenagers but damn replit's Vibe coding tool is fucking good. Better than Lovable or Bolt any day.
just to give u a perspective from a 20year old kid from a 3rd world county
I think this is exactly it. Replit is a cheap and easy way to get an MVP off the ground ASAP. However, their audience is inherently hackathon attendees, not real businesses. Whether these can turn into real businesses (en masse to justify low churn and consistent SaaS ARR) or not is the real question.
Why don't you just use Claude?
I don't get all these vibe coding tools when Claude is better than any of them
which country are you from?
Going by the username, I'm guessing India or perhaps Bangadesh
India it is
The title is a non-sequitur.
“Terrorist sympathizer” and “successful businessperson” (or “rich person”) are completely orthogonal. Building a successful business does not necessarily change your terrorist sympathisation status. You can be a rich terrorist sympathiser.
Your comment fails to mention that the accusations of sympathy for terrorism are lies.
I am not equipped to give an opinion on that either way. I’m just saying that building a successful business is independent of the accuracy of your ideology.
Fair comment. They are two different things.
well, it's not a high bar – these days anyone who says "I support Palestine Action" or "she was murdered by ICE" is called a terrorist sympathizer
> these days anyone who says "I support Palestine Action"
They have a video of people from this group attacking police with sledgehammers. It is strange how much of this 'direction action' is harming Ukraine support and not Israel. If people wanted to support Palestine they can do it without attacking their own countries' military - which is not operating in Israel at all.
> "she was murdered by ICE"
They have a video of her being shot, pretty much needlessly. I'd say that should be manslaughter at a minimum.
"They have a video of people from this group attacking police with sledgehammers"
Do you have the name or names of the person accused of 'attacking police with sledgehammers'?
I've heard a lot about this, but it's difficult to get to actual sources about exactly what is alleged.
Even if this did happen as you say. attachking police with sledgehammers is assault, potentially even attempted murder. There's plenty of laws for that.
It's not terrorism.
Congratulations, you've reached the level of "terrorist well-wisher"
Is there something you disagree with? My opinions were pretty neutral.
I just felt you didn't quite reach the criteria for "terrorist sympathizer" outlined above. I don't make the rules!
The internet is where every issue is a binary, nuance is scorned, and moderate views are weakness. You should know this already.
"centrist dad" is apparently an insult
It's like Hamlet. "To upvote, or to downvote".
UK military is operating in Palestine (very frequent military flights from their post-colonial base in Cyprus), and is operating in Israel (when they were shooting down drones, etc.), and is supplying Israel with weapons (directly by soldier training and indirectly by allowing to use their military bases), and joined in international coverup (they have detailed intelligence on what Israel was doing in Gaza, which they never released publicly any part of).
Pretty solid basis for direct action.
If they provided this level of support for Russia, they'd be a new Belarus.
Equating surveillance flights off the coast with "operating in the country" is tenuous at best. If that's the threshold, Russian military is already operating in Britain (see Yantar's adventures).
The mental effort a lot of people has made to pretend they aren't entirely powerless and irrelevant for stopping Israel's crimes is deeply impressive. The reality is that there's nothing the UK can do to stop Israel as long as the US is supporting them (short of going to war with both the US and Israel), but this reality is at odds with the desire to do something, so people invent and inflate leverage where there isn't any. Moreover, most of the time the very same people oppose creating more leverage for the future, as your added qualifier of "post-colonial" implies. It's depressing.
The UK military is and has been operating in Gaza, the UK government is just lying about it. Public flight tracking data makes it obvious.
That's a big statement to make - do you have any credible sources on that?
At a minimum the RAF has operated hundreds of surveillance flights over Gaza.
Multiple sources linked on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_and_the_Gaza_wa...
"Robot boots 30,000 feet above the ground" doesn't have quite the same ring to it.
> It is strange how much of this 'direction action' is harming Ukraine support
How is direct action on Palestine impacting Ukraine support? (We are also not intervening in Ukraine)
> (We are also not intervening in Ukraine)
Not direct intervention; but we fly sorties, provide intelligence, ship military equipment, build systems for... None of which we provide Israel for their current war.
It's just odd to me that Israel draws so much Ire when the UK deals with all sorts. There are many worse things happening that doesn't get a second of airtime.
I absolutely love the idea of Replit and I think it's an awesome platform and idea.
I do wonder how sustainable it is as a business though. I expect Replit is sending the majority of that money to the big AI labs through API costs
As soon as anything becomes serious you're going to try and take it off Replit and use something like Claude Code and AWS etc
It's fascinating to read how Hacker News helped make Replit successful. I hope everyone will try this tool! I wonder if Masad still scrolls here nowadays.
So success buys you ideological latitude
Are we still doing these kinds of lionizing puff pieces after SBF, Holmes, Musk and all the others? By now, I consider being featured in one a negative signal.
You've got to admit Holmes is an interesting character though.
Replit seems to be another company that doesn't justify it's valuation in this bubble
Replit has been around for years, has real users, and now reportedly real revenue
My bet is they sold lots if data for llm training
I think they are just hitting the consumer market hard. I have friends who have never coded & are using Replit. That said, not a single one of them has launched.
I can second this. I'm an online coding instructor and within our company Replit was the website/environment we were told to use with our students. I really didn't like it due to all the AI features (I believe that when you're learning to code you shouldn't use LLMs) but the collaboration features were really good.
Unfortunately they added a limit to the number of collaborators per account and we had to stop using it.
Of all the tools I try and review, replit remains to be simply the worst in my opinion. I struggle to do anything useful with it except trivial hello world type of stuff. The bubble is real.
I can't tell if this is valid criticism or a political statement.
It is not political; I did not know the owner had political opinions. I started using Replit before it had AI, had some ideas and they gave me a free year of AI last year when I complained it is so far behind the rest. And imho, it still is.
Like the other comment here: I just have much better outcomes with the same prompts with other tools. That is all I meant to say.
Cheers
Personally speaking, I get much better outcome from Lovable than Replit using same prompts.
Reading through this piece and all I can think of is how he's just the other side of the same coin. Simply a different color of the same elitism that our world is moving into as money concentrates and starts to meddle more and more with our political spheres while accountability slowly errodes to zero.
I found the piece rambling and incoherent, but I don't really see how this follows. This is an individual Jordanian founder who made a political statement. That's not really the same thing as the deep integration between the Israeli state, Zionist organizations, and big tech.
The coin is wealthy people. They're different sides of that coin. Hence why the commenter above is sensing some malice from both sides.
Both sides of...what? I'm confused. Is the idea "all these people have a lot more money than I think they'll ever need and it makes me mad"? Me too. Just don't see how it's relevant.
The idea is that as money gets so concentrated, so does real political power. And with that concentration of political power comes extreme disregard for the opinions of the masses. I think it's a fair argument that the world has always catered to the will of rich people, but the difference now is that rich people are so unfathomably rich, and so much wealth is concentrated in so few.
> but the difference now is that rich people are so unfathomably rich...
Compared to when? How many times in history has wealth been less concentrated?
As far as I'm aware, for almost all of history post-agriculture, wealth was highly concentrated while the average person lived in abject poverty (think: kings vs peasants). The mid-20th century was an era of mass prosperity in the US and parts of Europe, but it was an anomalous few decades, not the norm.
"The mid-20th century was an era of mass prosperity in the US and parts of Europe, but it was an anomalous few decades, not the norm."
But to those living and remembering that era - it was the norm that they (we) compare with, so it is the reference that matters.
Thank you
> How many times in history has wealth been less concentrated?
Mostly all of them! There have been periods where inequality dropped, but mostly it's been rising since at least the 1300s. I'm on mobile and can't link research, but there are a few papers that investigate this.
> As far as I'm aware, for almost all of history post-agriculture, wealth was highly concentrated while the average person lived in abject poverty (think: kings vs peasants).
And yet it was less unequal than now, an era where we've managed to use technology to concentrate wealth at an unprecedented scale. No longer is the richest person you know the king who collects your taxes next door, now it's a SV trillionaire on the other side of the world.
I see, thank you.
More plainly on my part, though I'm worried sounds like berating when the comments are viewed consecutively: what does that have to do with the article we are discussing?
Last I checked the Koch Brothers weren’t Israeli. Do read up on them. Oversimplified narratives are bullshit.
As the article mentions, Saudi Arabia is aiming to build its own deep integration with big tech, which Masad is enthusiastically participating in despite the Saudi government's own human rights issues. (He argues, quite conveniently if true, that the Replit tools he sells to the Saudi government won't be used for any of the bad stuff.)
This clarifies things, thank you. I've gotten the impression that Masad doesn't have a very coherent worldview so I doubt he has given this contradiction much thought.
What gives you that impression?
Reading the article? The only thing resembling an ideology in there is a vague libertarianism of the like a lot of founders express.
His own incoherent worldview
What does "Zionist" mean to you? I honestly don't understand what it means when Israel has existed as a Jewish state for 76 years and seems likely to continue doing so for the foreseeable future.
Zionist has become the OK word used to bash Jewish people. You ask 10 people what the word means you'll get 11 answers.
Is 'Zionism' the expansion of Israel into other territories?
Is 'Zionism' the belief that Israel and the majority of the world's Jews shouldn't be exterminated?
I thought it meant the first, lately I think people are meaning the second.
Zionism is a political movement that perpetrates atrocities with the aim of removing jewish populations from other parts of the world and settling them in Palestine.
It consists mainly of christians. If you assemble ten random zionists most or all of them will be christians, not jews.
Cristian evangelicals would be a much better term.
That’s just ziophobia.
That's not the definition I hear from Jewish people. I would go so far to say that's a pretty extremist take.
I notice you said Palestine and not Israel - do you believe Israel exists? If it does, should Isreal stop existing?
Zionism is older than the state of Israel. It is a political movement consisting mainly of christians.
If you want to learn more you could do worse than follow Zachary Foster's lectures for the Rutgers Center:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=zachary+foster+...
The podcast The Empire Never Ended has recently finished a rather good series on Meir Kahane, one of the most important influences on contemporary zionism:
https://www.patreon.com/tenepod
Although Palestinian nationalism does predate modern Zionism as it was originally directed at the Ottoman Rulers.
Kahane, notably a terrorist and racial supremacist.
The only difference being that he wants to replace those with himself and his.
> is how he's just the other side of the same coin.
Yes. And one side of the coin supports and justifies colonialism, apartheid and even genocide; the other side fights against it.
interesting hearing his justification for working w Saudi but not Israel: He says he would never work with Israel now. “I think it’s an illegitimate and criminal government,” he told me during our gun safety training. “I mean, [Benjamin] Netanyahu is a war criminal.”
When I pointed out that Saudi Arabia has its own abysmal human rights record, Masad drew a contrast.
“I just think about how Replit is going to be used. Like, Israel is actively committing genocide and ethnic cleansing, and if you sell to the government there, it’s possible that they’re going to use it for that,” he said, pointing to the country’s use of Microsoft cloud services to track Palestinians’ phone calls. (After an investigation by The Guardian, Microsoft said it disabled the services that made the tracking possible in September."
Seems like a silly excuse. If his concern is that Israel could use Replit for military purposes, then SA is perfectly capable of doing the same. And SA has - directly or indirectly - killed more people in Yemen than Israel has in Gaza.
I mean, if he was really consistent, he'd also not be operating a business in America, given America is responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent civilians (more than Israel and SA combined) in recent history.
I'd love to hear an argument for this being true that doesn't involve counting all of the deaths caused by Sunni-Shia sectarian violence in Iraq, suicide bombings in civilian markets, ISIS etc. as caused by America.
Well there's Vietnam, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya etc which would tally ~300k civilian deaths alone. Given the blatantly false pretences that America invaded Iraq under, and the sectarian violence that significantly flared post-Saddam, I don't see why you'd not want to involve Iraq in the stats?
I accept US responsibility for a great many of the civilian deaths caused in Vietnam. I don't accept US responsibility for Islamists of different varieties blowing up each other's markets and places of worship with weapons provided by Iran and Syria.
So you don't accept the fact that a lot of this sectarian violence flared after the toppling of Saddam, which was because of the US? And how many of the deaths do you attribute to the sectarian violence, as opposed to the direct actions of the US in the region?
The VAST majority of the deaths were from sectarian violence.
That was caused by a power vacuum and US's intentional act to oust the Ba'ath Party, remove all control from a country and it will fall to chaos especially when blood feuds are involved .
After toppling Saddam Hussein the US took political control in the country and decided who got to decide what. The slaughter that followed was a direct and rather predictable result of this.
Hey, get with the times. Whitewashing jihadis is in vogue these days.
Do you believe the violence would have happened without the US invasion?
"responsible" is a weasel word. By that logic China is also "responsible" for Cambodia genocide 1975-1979, and who are responsible for Sudan famine?
Am I in some weird alternative universe where Israel did not just engage in a genocidal campaign against a population of Palestinians that are descendants of refugees from their prior genocidal campaign? Israel just finished killing probably over a hundred thousand civilians. The displaced the majority of Gaza. They destroyed the vast majority of its hospitals and universities and public infrastructure. They killed foreign aid workers even after those foreign aid workers cleared their routes with Israelis. Israeli soldiers raped Palestinians on camera. Then those solders were celebrated on public Israeli television and by the Israeli government. Attempts to prosecute those solders resulted in punishment for the prosecutors.
Is Saudi Arabia a human rights violator? Yeah and so is a bunch of western governments. But no modern government comes close to the abuses of the Israeli government and Israeli military. This is the view of the free people of this world.
> from their prior genocidal campaign
Not only there is not a good argument for considering 1948 war a genocide on Palestinians but there is a much stronger argument Arabs have tried to genocide Jews (especially to those who think who think there was a genocide in Gaza because of starvation as a weapon of war + intent):
1. In 1948 Arab forces besieged Jerusalem and they were starting to run out of food.
2. Azzam Pasha, General Secretary of the Arab League, famously threatened "a war of extermination and a momentous massacre", Fawzi al-Qawuqji, commander of the Arab Liberation Army said that "we will have to initiate total war. We will murder, wreck and ruin everything standing in our way, be it English, American or Jewish.". Hell, several have even extended the threats to not just the Jews of Mandatory Palestine, but to Jews of the Arab world as a whole, such as Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Said("if a satisfactory solution of the Palestine case was not reached, severe measures should be taken against all Jews in Arab countries.") or the head of the Egyptian delegation to the General Assembly, Muhammad Hussein Heykal("the lives of 1,000,000 Jews in Muslim countries would be jeopardized by the establishment of a Jewish state." ). As Matiel Mughannam, head of the Arab Women's Organization in Palestine put it in an interview with Nadia Lourie in January 1948, "The UN decision has united all Arabs, as they have never been united before, not even against the Crusaders.... [A Jewish state] has no chance to survive now that the `holy war' has been declared. All the Jews will eventually be massacred. " (See Benny Morris' 1948 for sources on all of these)
Typical hasbara whataboutism, equating a statement by one guy that may or may not have been said 70 years ago to a livestream slaughter we just witnessed, where more than 50% of Israelis say "not enough force was used", not just offhanded remarks by radical leaders, which there are literal gigabytes of from Israelis of all walks of life. Just open up any popular political figure's Twitter and you'll see the most horrific statements, and not just statements, but action.
It isn't whataboutism to point out a wrong claim. Which statement is "a statement by one guy that may or may not have been said 70 years ago"? I gave four. I have made no claims about the current situation (and there was also plenty of action in 1948).
More than 70000 including 20000 children? Wow thats a lot.
You say that like it's unrealistic. The accepted death toll for the conflict in Yemen is nearly 400,000 people.
If your primary cause is Palestine then it's pretty internally consistent?
Pecunia non olet.
[money doesn't stink]
It truly does though. Any significant pile of it stinks of exploitation and death.
exe.dev is already miles better already than what replit is attempting to do with it's AI things
This guy isn't a mold-breaking radical, he's just a garden variety sociopath https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/
Yup.
Public opinion on Amjad shifted quite a bit in 2021 when he threatened to sue a former intern for his open-source project.
https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/
My opinion on him shifted because along with Paul Graham, they're the only tech leaders who have stood up for Palestinians. I don't agree with Graham on everything either, but I've gained a lot of respect for him speaking out against Zionism. They're rich, but it still is difficult to go against the entire venture capital industry to do the right thing.
This was the first thing I remembered about Amjad. I have never thought highly of him since.
"was called" - who was behind that?
Weasel words, basically. All too common in journalism. It's also common on Wikipedia but Wikipedia acknowledges it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word
that quotes attributed to "investors," according to Masad. but some of the most heinous stuff people said to him is public: https://x.com/rabois/status/1943804360863232513 "your friends should have not raped murdered and killed kids."
It's Twitter - that's how a lot of people (or bots) say hi.
> when Hamas attacked Israel, setting off the war in Gaza.
I don't know what Americans is smoking that they are actually believing this shit.
Learn some history guys before someone nuke the shit out you and is going to be too late for that.
It's in consensus, even by Hamas themselves.
"one being so good that anyone can become a software engineer".
Of course, smartphones' cameras are so good and accessible, but not anyone who became a professional photographer?
And of course, isn't software engineering far beyond than simply writing code in any form - whether in English or in symbols?
Smartphone cameras didn't turn everyone into a professional photographer, but they did radically expand who can take usable photos, experiment, and occasionally produce something valuable without years of training
Yes but smartphones decimated photography jobs, especially on the low end.
Pareto principle in action - smartphones are good enough for 80% of use cases. And so is AI for a lot of junior-level work.
The problem is, when there are no trainee and junior positions (and, increasingly, intermediate) being filled any more... there is no way for people to rise to senior levels. And that is going to screw up many industries hard.
Many industries have hit this without AI. One example is surveying: it used to be that you’d have a crew of survey techs moving around equipment and measuring reference points, a crew chief, and a licensed surveyor directing and signing off on them. Those techs and crew chief were the future surveyors, as licensed surveyor requires x years working under supervision.
Now there’s one or two guys out there with a total station and/or drone. You’ve gone from 10 techs/junior positions per surveyor to 1. The average surveyor is something like 60 years old and has no successor lined up.
Programming is mostly a craft. Engineering would be more like designing algorithms.
That's research. Engineering would be programming, but well. Taking into account future maintenance concerns and so on. Seems like the software world doesn't do a lot of it.
craft: downloading an 8088 emulator and using it
engineering: implementing an 8088 emulator
science: discovering a way to make an 8088 emulator using quantum computing
> Engineering would be programming, but well.
Software engineering is systems and measurement.
Capacity planning, growth rates, algorithmic complexity (typically not to the point of designing new fundamental algorithms), durability, DR, eventual consistency, race conditions, schema design, systems architecture, instrumentation, statistics, sampling, more measurement, tech debt maintenance and pragmatism, online migrations, designing for five nines uptime ...
Programming is turning requirements into code with or without respect to these higher level criteria. The implementation detail.
"Engineering would be programming, but well" fits :)
Just like word processing software and LLMs meant anyone can become a journalist. /s
So I got excited and used Replit because I heard about it in a Diary of a Ceo podcast. Spent days working on my project, it was working in their unique tech stack and when I did local git commits it locked some files and conflicted with their replit agent also doing git operations and got stuck in a loop where the fix was to do a git reset --hard and reset the state.
Unfortunately their tooling locks me out from doing that and I wouldn't get help from their team after asking twice and getting moved to several different support members of their team. They just ghosted me and so I left and took my business elsewhere. Doesn't seem like it was made for advanced users.
Unfortunate.
Unsurprising, the Diary of a CEO guy is a snake oil salesman. Awful interviewer, but very good at self promotion.
The idea of "advanced users" of vibe coding is interesting.
> Masad, 38, has felt obliged to speak out about Gaza ever since, calling out those in tech who, in his view, have supported Israel’s “genocide” of the Palestinian people.
This sentence would be better without the scare quotes. Something like "calling out those in tech who support what he views as a genocide."
The phrasing in the article shows very strong bias towards Israel in general
[flagged]
As it happens, genocide scholars disagree with you, and in any case, Gaza's population has not increased.
It's at least plausible that the population did increase. Estimates of births during the war are larger than the casualty count that Hamas claims.
It'd be nice if Israel would let UN fact-finding missionaries or other independent research teams into Gaza to find out (in addition to not barring and/or killing humanitarian aid workers)
Or even international media outside of proctored propaganda trips. They obviously have learned their lesson since the 1982 invasion.
It’s perfectly normal for militaries to have press restrictions in conflict zones, for opsec among other good reasons. No one bats an eye when Ukraine does it for example.
Bad analogy, for two reasons:
1. Ukraine’s media restrictions are virtually non-existent when compared to those enforced by the Israelis in Gaza, including the intentional bombing of media offices. Keep in mind that Hamas has repeatedly called upon Israel to allow foreign press and NGOs to visit and see what’s happening on the ground.
2. The Ukraine war is a conventional war between sovereign nations with standing militaries with equivalent capabilities (air force, anti-air defenses, armored vehicles, bomb shelters, etc). The Gaza genocide is an onslaught by a sovereign nation with a well equipped military against a militant group in a dense urban area. Leveling entire city blocks when fighting against an opponent that has no air force or anti-air capabilities is not only unimpressive, but also breaks the principle of proportionality.
1. It's pretty much the same - no press in dangerous areas unless invited and escorted by the military. The only major difference is that Ukraine is >1000x larger, and has safe areas far from any fighting where such press restrictions aren't needed.
2. You're making a bunch of separate accusations without connecting them to the topic at hand, which was press restrictions.
No, they’re not the same, and (2) is very relevant.
Let me reiterate: Ukraine is a sovereign nation with a sovereign military that has the ability to enforce restrictions within its own territory.
To bring your bad analogy more in line with reality on the ground, imagine if Ukraine was still part of/occupied by the USSR/Russia, and Russia enforced press restrictions across all of Ukrainian territory during a Ukrainian insurgency. However, in this theoretical USSR, Ukrainians did not get Soviet citizenship, and were under a total blockade.
> The only major difference is that Ukraine is >1000x larger, and has safe areas far from any fighting where such press restrictions aren't needed.
But Israel never allowed press into the strip, even during “ceasefire” periods - like right now! This implies that Israel is not somehow paternalistically concerned for press safety; it simply wants a media blackout.
So no, this “major difference” is irrelevant when comparing restrictions between the two conflicts.
I'm not sure what you're getting at. Universally, modern militaries don't like journalists wandering around near their assets.
> and Russia enforced press restrictions across all of Ukrainian territory
Your analogy isn't very different from reality. Russia does enforce press restrictions near military assets, including in occupied parts of Ukraine.
> However, in this theoretical USSR, Ukrainians did not get Soviet citizenship, and were under a total blockade.
That would seem very unfair, if Russia did it just because they're mean and not because this hypothetical Ukraine had launched tens of thousands of rockets at them. But I'm not sure what it has to do with press restrictions.
> even during “ceasefire” periods
The ceasefire was pretty much dead once Hamas attacked IDF soldiers in Rafah. Now it's just a lower-intensity conflict. Still not a great idea to have random journalists waltzing around and tweeting photos of military assets.
> it simply wants a media blackout
This is a funny explanation because there are millions of cameras in Gaza anyway, and this is the second most covered conflict (by metrics like article count) in all of human history. Not much of a "blackout" at all.
Alright, your good faith arguments have convinced me! To summarize:
On one side, two sovereign nations setting press restrictions in areas they control. Standard stuff.
On the other side, a genocidal state blockading a tiny strip of land for 20 years waging a campaign that has killed & maimed so many children that we have lost count unilaterally enforcing a total international media blackout. Also standard stuff.
Silly me, how could I even argue about this? It’s just so damn obvious! Sometimes, arguing with random anons on HN pays off :)
Gaza population September 2023: 2.3 million. Gaza population September 2025: 2.1 million.
Hamas casualties make up only a portion of palestinian casualties; palestinian casualties make up only a portion of excess deaths; excess deaths make up only a portion of total deaths.
The next census will be in 2027. No one knows the population until then.
It’s not clear that Hamas limits their counts to excess deaths. Even if they intended to, a lot of it is based on a web form, with not much validation besides basic checks that the person exists etc.
As with pretty much any conflict, there's a ton of uncertainly, and people shouldn't be recklessly speculating based on things like WhatsApp chats. Responsible casualty estimates would look more like Ukraine, where for example Zelenskyy said "tens of thousands" (one significant digit) were killed in Mariupol.
Estimates of birth that rely on the mid-2023 figure and deliberately ignore Israel's systematic dismantling of the health and food systems in Gaza and the drop in fertility levels.
>the casualty count that Hamas claims
The Gaza Health Ministry's count is widely regarded as an underestimate, but mostly by people who don't refer to it with a dogwhistling caveat.
> The Gaza Health Ministry's count is widely regarded as an underestimate
You mean Hamas’ estimate? Why do you think Hamas would underestimate their death toll?
4000 deliveries in march of 2025. 50000 pregnant woman [1]
50,000 births by july of 2024 (starting with october 7th 2023) [2]
you can sum and extrapolate the numbers. you can probably find more numbers about births
[1] https://www.savethechildren.net/news/about-130-children-born...
[2] https://www.savethechildren.net/news/women-self-inducing-lab...
I wasn’t going to reply but since you’ve been rescued from the flags: which “genocide scholars” think that in increase in population is possible during a genocide?
And yes, it has.
I figured it may have been because you decided to get informed about how genocides are identified by intent and not population deltas. But since you think a projection is the same thing as a census, that obviously isn't the case.
Regarding intent: if Israel intended to kill everyone in Palestine they’d nuke them, and not risk the lives of their children trying to ensure noncombatants are out of harms way in operations against Hamas.
I agree with you that it’s a genocide, but that is not universally accepted, so I think the scare quotes are OK. This article isn’t seeking to litigate the genocide in Gaza.
Scare quotes don’t mean that it’s not true.
It's funny how when talking about Israël's wrongdoings, everything is just "allegedly". Facts already confirms genocide, but hey, they don't want to land in hot water.
What an interesting tile. Is the value of his AI company expected to overcome the 'terrorist sympathizer' allegation? Is this how it works always or just when the person is inside the present Overton Window?
Let's try Elon Musk then: "He was called a 'fascist'. Now, his tech company is valued $1.5T"
This is the way, right?
“Terrorist sympathiser” doesn’t mean much these days. People call Ms. Rachel a “terrorist sympathiser” and “antisemite of the year” for not wanting kids to die or become amputees
> “Terrorist sympathiser” doesn’t mean much these days.
I guess it means almost as little as "fascist" then.
All these things are so amusing. Amjad Masad dislikes Israel and is fine with Saudi Arabia. Palmer Luckey will spend his life doing rainman calculations on the angle of the car in Minneapolis. One is a “terrorist”, other is a “fascist”.
But you can tell it’s all motivated reasoning. Standing with your tribe. It’s not much of a matter of honour. It’s just flashing your banners.
In the end, they are wealthy, but they are just people. And they have all these things and why do I really care what Ja Rule has to say about the new cyclone.
I respect him for standing up for his people. It’s honorable, in my opinion. It would be dishonorable (and easy) to be a mercenary, profit-seeking individual with loyalty to no one but himself.
Everyone stands up for their people. Tribalism is the most primitive form of society. Standing for principle is harder because sometimes you have to speak against your tribe.
Yes, it would be dishonorable to be mercenary, but being a tribalist is merely the default position. We’re all so at some scale.
Excellent reference at the end, thanks for making me feel old. :)
“Masad insists he speaks up even when it hurts his business. In that regard, ‘I’m probably the only contrarian in Silicon Valley.’”
The only contrarian, just like everyone else.
He and Paul Graham, truly are the only people speaking out against Zionism though. The rest of the VC industry is either staunchly pro-Israel or silent on the matter.
> He and Paul Graham, truly are the only people speaking out against Zionism
Not sure what about this is contrarian.
Going against everyone in your industry is contrarian. There are countless threads where Masad is attacked by mainstream venture capitalists and called "antisemitic" or "terrorist". Same with paulg.
That kinda depends on what questions the industry revolves around, doesn't it? For example, if I was once of the only vegetarian at YC, I don't think it would make me a contrarian. And it especially wouldn't if my background was of a Vegetarian-based religion.
Being against zionism means being against the state of Israel as a whole? Is this correct? So the state should no longer exists?
> Palestinian man is ok working with the Saudis At least it isn't the UAE but... really? Still happy for him though.
Silicon Valley’s biggest grifter, by a mile, back with another puff piece
A very good, albeit involuntary, reminder that in Silicon Valley your good or bad opinions and beliefs don’t matter as long as you’re a good vessel to multiply investment and add value to a billionaire’s already obscene wealth.
The article clearly states that he lost business and risked bankruptcy.
A reminder that antizionism is not antisemitism
Please do remind people more because they sure as hell need it.
No. Jews have the right to live in their own homeland and anyone who thinks otherwise is a racist.
I suspect most people that spend their time online ranting out 'zionists' (meaning 98% of Jews) haven't bothered to read any Herzl.
Trying to frame the violent expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland as just "Jews trying to live in their own homeland".. isn't working in 2026 and nobody needs to read the thoughts of a man who saw Cecil Rhodes as a kindred spirit.
Forgetting the part where Arabs tried to violently expel the Jews from Palestine? And the part where Jews were expelled from several Arab countries?
Jews were not only expelled from Arab counties, catholic too.
Anyone would resist occupation and ethnic cleansing.
How is Arab conquest of Palestine "resistance"? Palestine was at the time controlled by the Byzantine Empire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Muslim_conquest_of_Jerus...
Yarmuk 636 is one of the most depressing events in history.
Whenever I read about that or the disasters that ensued in the following centuries I always spend a day depressed.
Grim.
Jews left Arab stats on their own accord because of rise of Zionism.
Arab were the only folks who accepted Jews in the first place as they sought refuge from Nazi Europe
No. Speak to Persian and Iraqi Jews about their expulsion.
You can also look up arab violence and laws against Jews at any time you like. When the belief system mentions fighting Jews at the end of time when the trees will reveal them (except the evil Jew loving tree, yes really) you tend to act on those beliefs.
You mean the well-documented terrorist operations by Israel against Jews in the Arab disaspora? The terrorist state started with terrorism and sustained through it.
Damn those racist Haredi Jews, right?
The focus on a particular location is a religious one (in the scriptures there was a Jewish homeland before Israel or Egypt, and Israel is singled out because God told them to go), but it's also a selective one that ignores all the times God arranged for Israel not to be there; and crucially does not stop and wait for His opinion about the present. It is the most dangerous kind of religious opinion: one invented by us.
Herzl makes no religious argument, he is fairly close to an atheist. That’s why I mentioned people should read the book or a summary before commenting on the matter.
I don't think the "homeland" idea could have come from anywhere but religion. For one thing, there's a three (?) thousand year precedence.
Of course there could be, and Hertzel writes about it explicitly - the idea that Jews need a homeland because antisemitism makes it impossible for them to live within another people.
In regard to religion itself, like the other post said, he couldn't really care less and even advocated for Jews to convert to Christianity at a time, seeing it as another solution to the discrimination they're facing: "I see myself as an average modern Jew and I'm not afraid from the idea of a formal conversion to Christianity. I have a son, and I'd prefer converting today and not tomorrow so that his membership will start earlier and I can save him from the troubles and discrimination he'll face as a Jew".
There are other groups that could claim the same: Romany/Gypsies would be a big one but no one seems to want to claim a North Indian homeland for them; Sikhs might be another.
"I don't believe in god but he promised me this land 3000 years ago" sums up Zionism pretty well, or "Jews aren't safe anywhere so let's create a state by wiping out and expelling the native population and make enemies of all our neighbors". It's such a laughably self-contradicting ideology
I recommend _Culture in Nazi Germany_ by Michael K Kater. [0]
The push for a Zionist state started and accelerated in the 1920s to the end of the 1930s. Most of the Jews that moved from Europe to Palestine, which was part of modern day Israel, were by the Zionists. Reason is because the only jobs at the time were farming so people would have to give up their current triad.
Number of these individuals actually supported fascism. Even after WWII the mind set was not that fascism was bad but poorly implemented. That mind set was shared by a number of Germans and Jews that moved to Palestine before Israel became a state.
It was not until the late 1960s that younger culture started to shift that mind set to fascism is bad.
If you think I am wrong about the summation of the book ... read it.
[0] https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300253375/culture-in-naz...
As mentioned, I recommend going directly to the source. The clearest indication of what Zionism is the father of modern Zionism and Israel: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/25282/25282-h/25282-h.htm
It's a hundred pages. If someone hasn't read it, or even a summary, they have little knowledge of Zionism. WW2 was far after the modern return of Jews to Israel.
I grew up in a very left leaning, pro terrorism household. I was absolutely wrong about what Zionism was - not a 'God promised me this because I'm special" as I was told but rather "racism means we need a homeland let's all go back to Israel".
You sound like you’re trying to collapse the term into a single definition based on one guy, which just doesn’t match the variety of people and motivations using it today. Christian white nationalists in the US are not calling themselves Zionist because “we need a homeland, let’s all go back to Israel”.
You might as well say that Republicans are the party that fought the Confederates and freed the slaves. It is not true today.
How does having a religious base state prevent bigotry and discrimination? Both are mutually exclusive.
In the world, Jews discriminate against Jews, Christians discriminate against Christians, Muslims discriminate Muslims, ... A religious state can only have one variant of religion that is deemed the right variation even though multiple variations exist.
The closest thing to a non bigot and discriminating state is one that is not built on religion but accepts other people and allows them to exercise their variation of religion.
Earth is the home land of humans not a politically divided territory.
> How does having a religious base state prevent bigotry and discrimination?
Jews are an ethnoreligious group. You can be an atheist and return to Israel if you want. 20% of the population is Arab, with more rights than most Arab countries, for example Arabs in Israel vote for Arab politicians that argue with other Arab politicians in the Knesset, in Arabic.
Likewise Druze are more protected in Israel than they are in the rest of the middle East.
> prevent bigotry and discrimination
Israeli Arabs have the same rights as Jews, Asians and Europeans.
"More rights than most Arab countries" lmao sure, just cause you keep repeating a slogan doesn't make it true, that's called propaganda, there's very systematic and well-documented racism towards anyone who's not a Jew
Stopped reading after "shooting range".
Please don't comment like this. It's not a substantive contribution to the discussion to tell us that you stopped reading the article, and it's generally fulmination or curmudgeonliness or a shallow dismissal or something else that's against the guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> “Should I wear a keffiyeh to the shooting range?”
I'll give the writer this -- they conveyed a lot of information in just one short first sentence. I read a bit farther, but it didn't tell me anything I couldn't already guess from that sentence.
I don't understand why the word genocide is quoted, as if it was an odd opinion of the person they are writing the profile about.
Replay will implode once the AI mania cools off
I'm not a fan of a guy who builds a brand around politics. It will come around.
Like it has to other business guys who have built a brand around politics?