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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

157 votes so we can have an amateur North Korea/US comparative studies class. Respite from 3-year-old LKML security flame war, also on the front page? Maybe. Still sad. See you in a week or so.

My "minaway" is 10,000 again. Old timer? Have you tried this yet? It's a revelation. You will thank for me this advice. Noprocrast=yes, minaway 10000+. You might code instead, or drink whiskey and read a good book, or find some less exasperating place to rant at like-minded people online. Anything else you do will be better than HN on May 12, 2011.

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I respect most of what you post on HN - you have great insights and offer a lot of knowledgeable information to most of the threads you participate in - but I can't say this post was one of them. Wouldn't it be far more productive to skip threads that might not interest you? Otherwise you are, IMHO, adding a rant just like everyone you are criticizing.

It's way easier to post stories about current events and politics than it is to find genuine, high quality, on-topic material. The possibilities for rants are endless. They need to be ostracized, lest a trickle develop into a stream, river and then flood.

HN Guidelines:

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon... If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

This is off-topic. There is essentially no chance that anything useful will shake out from the ensuing discussion. It's noise, and it crowds out the signal.

I'm glad that tptacek's post is currently the #1 post.

The article actually speaks to the fact that you can use tech to view atrocities like these that are otherwise kept hidden. No one would have evidence of North Korean concentration camps --- not with only 2 survivors in some 60 years (according to the article, if I'm remembering right) --- without satellites and, in particular, Google Earth.

The conversation may have gone off-topic, but it didn't start that way.

> Wouldn't it be far more productive to skip threads that might not interest you?

Actually, no. If you ignore all the stories you don't want to see, you allow a site like this one to drift towards the lowest common denominator. Promoting what you like is one part of helping create a community you will enjoy, but actively discouraging the stories/comments you don't want to see is another part. An even more important part, if you want to see your community stay focused and true to the spirit it started out with in the face of an increasing (and increasingly varied/diluted) user base and funny pictures of cats.

Remember how pg outlined grumpiness as one of the biggest problems HN is facing? Yeah.

Flag the thread like the rest of us and don't be an internet martyr about it.

What exactly are you objecting? That this topic is covered in HN or that it is being discussed in an "amateurish" way.

If it is the first, this brings us back to the "what should be covered by HN" debate. I, for one enjoy discussing matters unrelated to C++, Erlang, VCs, YC, Apple, etc. every now and then. If you don't agree, there are tons of other topics on HN.

The second point is more self-evident: of course it is amateurish, we don't have foreign policy experts here (I think). Yet we are (mostly) intelligent people tackling a problem with the small number of facts at hand. Your statement then becomes self-referential, because by posting it to this thread, you add nothing to the discussion.

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