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"What fools we are to live in a generation for which war is a computer game for our children and just an interesting little Channel 4 news item"

- Tony Benn, MP, in the UK parliament, speaking against a resolution authorizing bombing of Iraq in 1998

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfXmpJRZPYI

Yeah. The big men wage real wars, kill people. What do they expect from the children?

Seems like the sword and shield icons are backwards in terms of who started the war. And “bloc” vs “coalition” lol.

Wonder how much of this came out of the prompter’s mind versus the LLM itself.

Nobody would put this much effort into it as a hobby unless they were happy about it, so that necessitates a certain point of view.

Use a uBO filter to change the icons? Write a Vibe coded extension that flips the icons?

https://iran.liveuamap.com/ is a more human curated experience of pretty much the same thing (+ more), albeit not as flashy and a more traditional UI compared to the obviously LLM-generated UI + colorscheme.

The llm one seems better. Whats making you assert “obviously llm generated”?

It does remind me of

https://robotaxitracker.com/

https://unitedstarlinktracker.com/

But they’re all great

I’m not seeing any simulations. It’s just a text feed?

Also no inversion on who started the war.

I like the user interface. How is the data collected? is it community driven?

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and what is MOB

i'm not really sure. they keep shouting out MOB though, I don't think they really have definition

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and/or flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

[dead]

I'm not really posting flamebait. As far as substantive comments go, we are currently using this man's own body to write this comment through our very based brain-computer interface. Many versions of which of are running rampant in the domestic United States of America, and have been for quite a while.

This man has been compromised since his very earliest childhood memories, and this is not an uncommon state of affairs in his country, most people compromised are unaware of this because they have never experienced anything close to what the authentic human experience should be like. Those who are aware, are usually just ignored, bringing awareness to this does not achieve anything.

The vast majority of (nearly all) of your "national security threats" do not exist, in the sense they are artificially manufactured by people (and other systems) we have deeply compromised. Much of your "economic activity" is artificially manufactured too actually.

If you want these comments to be sustained, simply talk to the account writing these messages, or try to get him into one of the very few neuroimaging systems we do not have deeply compromised (if not the machine(s) system(s), than the other systems which interpret their results, including [and especially] human perception).

I hear you, and I'm sorry for calling your posts flamebait. However, we've been getting quite a few complaints from HN users about your posts being off-topic, so I think it's best if we suspend the account for now, so its posts will be less visible for a while. We can always reverse that later when conditions change.

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The interception disparity really drives home how air superiority dominates modern war planning. (That and not getting scammed on Russian kit.)

i feel like i misunderstand the UI - it seems to show coalition strikes mostly being intercepted? or does the bottom row refer to strikes against coalition forces?

Same. Why does it have a "belligerent" tag/badge - that seems to indicate bias.

But other than not understanding the data, the UI looks really fancy.

I doubt that the Russian kit is a scam.

I'm sure it is reasonably good. It just can't compete with the US's combination of technology, quantity, and operational excellence.

I don't mean that in a rah-rah way, it just seems to be the reality.

> It just can't compete with the US's combination of technology, quantity, and operational excellence

Or Israeli. In India, it couldn’t compete with Chinese kit.

If Russia sold its air-defence systems as only protecting against Hezbollah-caliber munitions, you’d be correct. They didn’t. They pitched it as a bulwark against a superpower. (Saddam learned the same lesson in 2003.)

> I doubt that the Russian kit is a scam.

I think there are pretty clear signs.

The T-14 Armata and Sukhoi Su-57 not really showing up in Ukraine, for example. As well as the S-500, which seems to be vulnerable to even 1990s tech like the ATACMS.

I don’t think Iran ever thought their defenses would do jack in a full on invasion. They thought (rightfully) that their defenses would force the US to go all in if they wanted to do anything significant.

Why the hell is Iran bombing other middle eastern states, like UAE?

I'm quite naive about these conflicts but it seems like whoever is in charge of the Iran military really has a death wish. I wouldn't be surprised if Iran is a parking lot by the end of the year at this rate.

They are mostly bombing US bases in those states + some connected locations (hotels where US operatives were being stationed), and energy production infrastructure.

Basically the Iranian war plan seems pretty simple and clear: try to destroy US and Israeli military infrastructure in the region, and destroy energy infrastructure to raise the cost of oil. The first part is a completely legitimate military target, especially in a war of defense as Iran is waging. The second part is not legitimate, but the thinking behind it is very simple and clear.

Mostly bombing the airbases. And then went to bomb the oil infrastructure. Guess it is to show them that getting the US on your soil not only doesn’t give you protection but gives you bombs.

We will see how this plays out. Meanwhile gas is north of 1.6 CAD a litre in my city.

Because the UAE happily keeps their air space open to the US, and their economy is driven (largely) by rich westerners.

More importantly, the US has actual bases there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Dhafra_Air_Base

And dozens of others, in Jordan, Iraq, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman...

https://www.americansecurityproject.org/national-security-st...

> Why the hell is Iran bombing other middle eastern states, like UAE?

The theory was probably that the Gulf states are only begrudgingly going along with Washington in this war, and that the moment they start seeing costs they’ll personally call Trump to stop it. What Iran miscalculated on are the Gulf’s (a) long-time frustrations with Tehran, (b) massive bets on economies that suffer from capitulation and (c) monarchies being a stubborn lot.

Alternate hypothesis: Iran’s hardliners think escalating the war lets them consolidate more of a smaller pie. (If you’re looking for the truly WTF moves, it’s targeting Cyprus and Azerbaijan, the latter who has Iran’s sizable Azeri minority right on its border.)

As said by others Iran is attacking US Military bases in these countries not the countries themselves.

No, it attacked Azerbaijan's airport and Saudi oil refineries, among many other civilian targets. They're just hitting whatever they can.

Because they're supporting the US regime.

They said they would retaliate against US assets in the region if they were attacked, and then the US attacked, so now they kind of have to. In 1973 OAPEC announced that they were going to stop selling oil to countries that supported Israel in the Yom Kippur war, which rather quickly caused the US to rein in the israelis. Perhaps Iran is making a similar bet now.

Iran is a very large country, to make it into "a parking lot" would take many years, during which time we'd have a global recession and core US partners in the region would collapse.

Unlike what some would have you believe, the iranian leaders are generally quite thoughtful and educated. It's not an Idi Amin regime, or the occident would be supporting it.

They are attempting to pull other actors into the conflict to increase the chaos of the war, and to increase the cost to the US of fighting it. They can't necessarily win an all out war, but they can make it so costly to the US that the already small political capital they have to fight it dries up.

Because disrupting energy exports is the easiest way to pressure their aggressors and most of the states are openly supporting the US. They get bombed to hell anyways because there was no real plan besides hoping for submission after the decapitation strike so they will make it hurt for everyone else. China is open for talks to keep Hormuz open. Russia is flying in whatever because they see a lifeline with higher energy prizes on the global market. The middle eastern states are diverting investments into the us. Look at a map there is no way the US can effectively put boots on the ground the whole country is a natural fortress. It would be a worse disaster than Afghanistan.

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They all have security guarantees from the US and host US military bases. Also, they are like the psycho child who wants to hurt anyone nearby. The government is an occupying force in Iran, which is not wanted by iranian people. Some arabs took over Iran 40 years ago and have been terrorizing anyone nearby and the people of Iran.

It’s the Poor Man’s MAD (mutually assured destruction). They want this conflict to be as painful as possible so that pressure is applied to the aggressors to stop. The US can’t defend all of the possible targets, it causes a lot of economic damage and increases uncertainty for everyone in the region.

This is one of the reasons that most administrations declined to start a war with Iran in the past, the risk that they would do something like this, that taking out the leaders wouldn’t end the threat but would just make it more wild and unpredictable.

We live in truly bizarre times.

Kind of weird to mark Lebanon as a belligerent, unless Iraq also gets the tag.

I prefer to wait until ACLED has curated information, and until then browse video snippets and draw conclusions from those.

what purpose does this serve? betting ?

One of the more unintentionally depressing comments I have ever seen on HN, the first guess on the "purpose" of reporting on a war is to profit from it by gambling. Our society has gotten to a dark place.

what i find sad is a dashboard so that taxpayers can watch their money turning to murder in real time.

the redeeming quality is that the information is extremely incomplete , lots of things happening we don't see or know about

>what i find sad is a dashboard so that taxpayers can watch their money turning to murder in real time.

The existence of a dashboard is not an inherent endorsement of that murder. It's easy to look at this dashboard as a critique of that murder even if that wasn't the intent of the author. However, your initial jump to assuming that this dashboard is more likely to serve a financial purpose does reveal an actual political ideology (although not necessarily your political ideology), a cold dehumanizing capitalistic ideology, the kind I would consider largely responsible for those murders.

If "launched" is the number of attacks one side has launched and "intercepted" is the number of attacks that one side has neutralized, "hit" should be the number of missiles that one side has launched and hit the target? No, apparently it's the number of targets that have been hit on one side. Also, currently the coalition has intercepted a thousand more attacks than Iraq block launched. How can it be? Friendly fire? This thing is incredibly confusing.

(A little offtopic?) but Is there anything that the general public can do to show their dissatisfaction with the war.

I hated Khamenei. He was a cruel dictator but the way the war is happening, the strikes are gonna impact the Iranian lives the most. They are stuck between a rock and cliff.

I am not a military guy but I could've either expected this 1 month ago when the protests were going on but the way this has happened, with bombings on girl schools somehow taking place by US/Israel. What has happened is that Khamenei has somehow become a martyr. Something unthinkable a month ago.

I know the world is being crazy mad nowadays but this seems to be the tipping point for me as the world escalates towards hot war.

I'd like to know if society at large or even politicians or anyone had a say in all of this. It all just happened all of a sudden.

I remember hearing the news of US attacking Iran on radio and I was geniunely shocked. Like, the only thing I was thinking was "Is this fucking gonna happen"

then Khamenei got killed. Once again, some were saying just a few days now and celebrating while others were critical that this isn't as easy as killing khamenei and the war is still left.

The way US has done this all, the key takeaway for most countries is to make their own nukes. Iran was negotiating for all its flaws to control nuclear but US striked it while also contradicting things it said a few months back.

If Iran truly had nuclear, US couldn't have done this so are we having the idea of make nukes to protect oneself which to me does feel like something which can be prevented, I am not sure.

Now, I am hearing news of a proper ground invasion becoming more and more likely and also Kurdish forces being given arms to do it too and the war streching to 5-8 weeks but I don't think that's the case especially when Israel is somehow having the say here saying that we will kill anyone who comes in power next to khamenei which makes anything like a venezuela style thing (which was still illegal mind you) just straight up impossible.

The world is heading up towards a cliff and it feels like we don't even have any say in it. Not even American citizens whose taxpayers are being used.

I just feel frustrated by geopolitics. I used to enjoy reading about geopolitics 1 year back but literally the past year of geopolitics have been so depressing. Like, I remember thinking a year back, this must be the lowest point but now I wonder that there can always be a more lower point.

At some point tho, we are bound to have global stability slowly get better. I just hope that its now rather than later otherwise if we go even more down on this slippery slope, then I don't know where we are headed. at this point, I don't even know where we are.

The creator of this dashboard is Israeli - given some of the questions about the sword/shield icons, labelling of countries as belligerents/targets etc. I felt it was relevant to state this. Not to mention selective information bias.

Considering this is a joint operation by the US and Israel plus the plurality if not the majority of the users of HN being American, I wonder would you have felt the need to comment this if the creator was American?

This is quite concerning. Your comment made me somehow wonder if the people of Israel seem to support this war and it turns out that the answer is sort of yes[0]

I remember Witold pilecki during these times although polish, he was the first person to report the allies about the atrocities happening within the holocaust which the allies thought were not even possible, they thought he was exaggerating, that there was no way that this level of atrocity can take place.

Only to see the nation torn up by that atrocity to be in the next few generations be the one supporting a war which has no end in sight, a war which is killing school children, civilians and so many more.

I just pray that the world can get better because I am worried for the jewish population because I am seeing hatred towards the group themselves online. Some of which don't want to do anything with the war and live normal lives, I just hope that they can use their voice to stand for what's right in terms of humanitarianism.

It's gonna be a cycle of hatred which breeds more hatred which is only gonna lead to pain. I hope that people of israel realize the option of peace too and protest against their govt. and I am hearing protests from the US side but not so much from the Israeli side. A world run on wars has no winners. People are also questioning how much US had a say in the war after Marco Rubio's statement and these wars are sadly gonna lead to more anti-semitism in the future affecting the normal jewish population the most.

I genuinely hope that in the future that, Israeli people can try to reflect on the whole situation and try to create an internal pressure to stop war.

Humanity can actually try to uplift itself but it seems that we are flailing downwards.

[0]: https://www.timesofisrael.com/poll-most-jewish-israelis-supp...

I'm Iranian (albeit Christian) and unfortunately.. Iranians _also_ support this war (specifically the Shia sect supporting the regime). As a matter of fact, they have been _praying_ for this.

Shia Muslims have a strong martyrdom culture in comparison to Sunnis. This is why assassination of Khamenei didn't do anything in terms of disruption. He was martyred during the holy month of Ramadan and they welcomed it. All US did was created another honorable martyr for them.

I know it's difficult for Westerners to grasp how someone could pray for their own death but this is what they do. Decapitating their leadership doesn't do much because the next guy just takes over.

30% of the population in IRAN is composed of these fanatics and they will gladly give up their lives for IRGC. In a country of 90M, that amounts to a lot of people. IRAN has very difficult terrain and IRGC has been preparing for this war for the past 30 years. They don't care about the lives of Iranians, US can bomb Tehran to hell and they will not care. They have nothing to lose and will gladly sacrifice innocent people.

The Shia's motto is: "Every day is Ashura, every land is Karbala" [0], [1]

I think this is going to be a difficult conflict for everyone.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashura [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karbala

> I'm Iranian (albeit Christian) and unfortunately.. Iranians _also_ support this war (specifically the Shia sect supporting the regime). As a matter of fact, they have been _praying_ for this.

I actually agree with you. This is the reason why I am saying that Israel/US shouldn't have given it to the Iranian regime as well.

Because as we both know that Iranian regime and the Iranian people are different will and it seems that this war is gonna impact the Iranian people the people I am worried about from my original comment and it was my attempt to suggest de-escalation of war feels the better route.

> I think this is going to be a difficult conflict for everyone. & > US can bomb Tehran to hell and they will not care. They have nothing to lose and will gladly sacrifice innocent people.

I agree with this too and this is why I am saying that innocent people will lose their lives in this conflict and I am sure that you must've heard of the horrible incidents happening too.

I had a friend who was Iranian and they were Muslim (I never asked their sect) and they were against the regime as well, quite a lot actually.

I am curious to know what your thoughts are on the peace of the situation. I suppose you want peace as well for the people, right?

My point was that the jewish faith within israel/israeli people themselves in general could better rally for peace given that they had a very messy past as well with regards to atrocities which is something that we aren't seeing, with regards to either the palestine or now Iran where in both cases, the innocent normal everyday people lives are getting killed.

I just want peace. That's all.

> I know it's difficult for Westerners to grasp how someone could pray for their own death but this is what they do.

I think some Americans have familiarity with the concept. There’s a somewhat popular myth within Evangelical Christianity that reasons that the US itself needs to be destroyed before the Rapture can occur, because there is no mention of the US in any prophecy. (I’ve heard Micah 4 cited as one possible reference but it’s a flimsy one, even by apocalypse prophecy standards.)

Here is one variant of this myth in the context of the current conflict: https://baptistnews.com/article/the-end-times-theology-drivi...

This is an incredibly ignorant comment. Iran isn’t Palestine and it’s a category error to project your feelings about Palestine into Iran. Iran’s attacks on Israel aren’t like Palestinians attacking a country that is occupying their territory. Iran is a sophisticated country that uses military action to further its own geopolitical interests. Iran has been attacking Israel—launching missiles and funding terrorists like Hezbollah—for decades.

Moreover, out of all the countries that attack Israel, Iran has the least reason to do so. Iran is a thousand miles away from Israel and has no security concerns from Israel’s existence. In fact, the two countries had peaceful relations for decades before the Islamic theocracy took over in 1979. Iran was the second Muslim majority country to recognize Israel’s sovereignty and the two countries had peaceful relations for decades.

Iran is getting attacked by Israel because it has chosen for decades to launch offensive attacks against Israel for no reason.

Obviously I hate the Iranian Regime as well, maybe even more than what you might imagine because I had a friend in Tehran,Iran whom I met who hated the regime and everything that came with it.

I had helped them prevent censorship from their own regime from using psiphonvpn which is insecure and helped them install protonVPN and helped them be more safe as they were using malware version of minecraft (tlauncher) and helped them use open source alternative instead so that they can enjoy a game in the world of inflation and repression and played the game with them and we have talked so much about Iranian regime.

There were scheduled blackouts and a lack of Battery storage due to prices so when blackout happened, everything turned off in most households of Tehran, the capital city of Iran.

The regime had done so many atrocities to its own people too.

But what I am trying to just say is that in this war against Iran though, The very same people I told you about who hated the regime are getting killed too.

My point is that atrocities are being done perhaps as we speak as US/Israeli forces strike tehran. Innocent people are losing lives and the same people who used to protest against the regime are getting killed as well and even school children aren't safe[0]

My comment had hoped that I could urge that this war on Iran is killing civilians and doing atrocities and there is no end to this war as far as I can tell.

This war, as much as I hate the Iranian Regime, I can't help but feel like was an escalation which is going to cause so many deaths of innocent lives. The deaths of these innocents lives is an atrocity.

Of course, me and you can go sit in our houses at safety and sleep at night and argue on forums on how wrong one another is, but I think about that friend that I can't contact because of blackouts, whom I was worried about from their own govt. when the protests had happened that I was worried about their lives, and right now, I am worried about their lives too.

And regarding Marco Rubio's statement which I am paraphasing that but Israel would've attacked Iran and so its better if we best attack with them feels so fickle response from US in the sense that US is a superpower which couldn't stop Israel from such escalation, rather dugging itself into blood of innocents like so many times in the pasts within the same region that I need not remind you of.

If you are telling me that US the superpower, couldn't stop Israel in starting a war so it joined it, then I am fine to hear that too but I don't believe it. I do believe that US could've definitely stopped it. This war could've been prevented just like the last wars.

I am now worried about the safety of my friend who lives in tehran in the same way that I was worried about the people of ukraine for. I am worried about the deaths of innocents, sir.

I am worried that the world has failed those people who lose their innocent lives in such conflicts and are currently in danger. The war is happening. More innocent people will lose their lives.

I don't support any sides of the war. I support peace.

> This is an incredibly ignorant comment

I am sorry if you feel that way. I had thought that my discussions with my friend of tehran and even Israeli friends could've made me less ignorant. I can be wrong, I usually am. I am unable in good conscience agree to this war

If you are interested in knowing how I feel, I think Spanish PM has been vocal about it too and that's exactly how I feel even though I am not Spanish.

'No to War.' That's all.

I am sorry if you still feel like I am ignorant though. I am just sharing how I feel/make up of the whole situation.

I just feel like this war is only going to get downward spiral in terms of the innocent lives it takes, in terms of the financial damage it costs, in terms of the diplomatic rifts in the whole region not just iran/israel or some few as the war gets more messy.

[0]: Analysis suggests US was responsible for deadly strike on Iranian elementary school :https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/06/middleeast/iran-minab-ele...