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Comment by grapehut | Hacker News Reader

FWIW the person you're replying to represents everything that is bad about HN. If you read his post history you'd be lead to believe he's an industry insider in: Shipping, Irrigation, Crypto Currencies, Genetics, Nano Technology, Manufacturing, Microkernels and a lot more if you keep going back.

There was a time I believed his posts, until I read one of his mini-essays on a topic I happened to know about (cryptography) and it was painful obvious that it was someone who spent 10 minutes googling the topic and took it upon themselves to give a dangerously incorrect "authoritative" lay of the land. Since then I've tagged those people as "faux experts". I don't blame him, I did the same thing for high-school essays, albeit with a more jilted writing style. Just be careful who and what you believe

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This is a personal attack, and is not OK on Hacker News. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12561364 and marked it off-topic.

You'd also guess he was an expert on networking...

Animats (John Nagle) is a long-time SV type, bright (founded his own company, has a few patents), and has interests in a bunch of areas. Apparently reads and thinks a fair bit.

He's not representing himself as an insider. Most of what I've seen checks out fairly well, and he's got a maturity and insight I wish were more frequently found here. He's not infallible, and doesn't portray himself as such. Few of us are.

Some background from earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9048947

Your comments are quite uncharitable.

I think he's annoyed because I criticized the poor auditability of Bitcoin. Yes, you can tell if someone received Bitcoins at some address. What you can't tell is whether they still have exclusive control of them. If someone else has a copy of the private key, the coins can disappear at any time. This happens in practice all too often.

(Yeah, multi-sig, etc.. Not that it helped Bitfinex.)

That wasn't what I was referring to, and although I hold very little interest in bitcoin, I do know enough that "[...] you can't count it without access to the keys that let you spend it." is fundamentally wrong. However, I'm glad you have since refined your stance to something more tenable, but anyway, let's not get too off topic.

As I know absolutely nothing about the shipping industry or Hanjin, what is your background or interest in it?

I appreciate your first comment calling out that people should check sources on their own and verify claims made in discussions. I do not feel that you and Animats are adding value by furthering the discussion here.

I read every comment 'Animats writes --- he's probably forgotten more about computing than I'll ever learn --- and while I've disagreed with a lot of things he's said, I've never come across a crypto comment that made me feel he was channeling Wikipedia. I think I'd have noticed.

That aside: comments like this are extremely inappropriate for Hacker News. We don't write comments whose sole purpose is to take down other commenters.

I'd be embarrassed to have written something like this in public. Maybe you were just having a bad night or something.

When someone is commenting on a field outside your wheelhouse, what signs lead you to believe they are a faux expert?

And all written on HN for karma. They should write it on their own blog and try monetising it.

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