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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Sure, I'll answer that.

First, you assumptively respond as if 'DannyBee doesn't have any data, because you dispute the provenance of his data. But there's a difference between "I agree with the validity of your data" and "you knowingly are arguing without evidence".

Then, you pointlessly barb him about the selectivity of his memory.

Finally, you deploy the classic message-board-jerk "nice work" rhetoric, which exists solely in order to inform the person you're talking to that you don't respect what they're writing.

That's a lot of rudeness to pack into such a lightweight comment.

A writer with exactly the same information trying to persuade people of the exact same position could accomplish what you've accomplished so far with just the words:

"I don't agree with you".

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No, I do not respect the rhetorical tactic attempting to paint my opinion with the the pejorative "violently." It's a cheap dishonest trick, and I will treat it as it deserves to be treated.

There's nothing pointless or "barbing" (another word attempting to rhetorically paint my position) about my selective memory comment. I simply do not believe he talked to 200 people who all said SF sucked in the past. I truly think that he's leaving out people who believe otherwise.

And it's not a controversial or "rude" opinion to say anecdotes are not data.

I saw this comment because I read all of DannyBee's comments, because they are frequently pretty great. That's a big part of how I read HN.

Another person I read religious is 'dang, whose comments are the informal moderator log of HN.

And why I'm saying this to you is, pretty much everyone that gets called out for incivility on HN deploys the argument you just did: "my incivility was justified by the comment that preceded it".

I'm not persuaded.

You asked!

And I mostly recognize your name from comments I find to be rude.

So here we are. :-)

If you see another of those, please do call me out. You'd be doing me a favor. Rudeness is a tendency I have to fight hard to try to suppress.

Honestly, I think I'm a little different from your average HN'er on this. And from dang as well. I don't care if you're "rude", I just care if you're right. I just don't place that high a value on civility, though I do understand that others do.

Truth be told, I kinda see that to my advantage, since I like to think it lets me see truths others miss when they're expressed in an uncivil manner.

Anyway, the other reason I know your id is that you're working to transform the very broken world of tech hiring, and I most sincerely wish you the best there.

Thank you! That was nice of you to say.

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