Hacker News Reader

There is nothing rigorous about the ongoing fantasy that random HN commenters know things that no one else does.

I have regularly found that random HN commenters often turn out to have years of professional experience in the industries they are commenting on. Its one of the fun parts of reading HN.

But it'd be great to have an "ignore user" function for those few who just google their skepticism.

If their recently-googled skepticism is accurate, then I don't care how cursory it is - it saves me the five minutes of looking up the same sources myself.

You might want to get the "Hacker News Enhancement Suite" extension. It's incredibly useful for cases like this, for instance I have tagged Animats (the creator of this sub thread) as "faux expert" after reading some of his crypto posts (a topic I know something about) that were written as if he was an expert, but completely and dangerously wrong.

Not knowing anything about chemistry, I would've been inclined to believe his post if it wasn't for the Hacker News extension suite, and I can read from someone who actually knows the field

That observation is circular and incredibly dangerous, though, for self-evident reasons including this thread.

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