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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

This is a ridiculously ungenerous interpretation of Amos's blogging motivations. What troll waits two years to stir the pot? There's absolutely no need to be inflammatory and I think his posting history demonstrates that he absolutely is not a troll.

Please don't downrank that one, too. I'm genuinely sorry about the week y'all have had, but this comment thread is the /only/ one asking about "the controversy" (which is dead and gone - everyone has decided whether I had a point or was being a jerk), please just nuke comments asking about it rather than preventing discussions about the cost of cloud hosting, how attacks work, how to mitigate them, etc.

I certainly didn't DDoS myself just to "game the system". It happened, I learned a bunch of things, did an extensive post-mortem, a lot of folks are finding it interesting, that's it - no smart trolling here, just content. I certainly could use a break from "the discourse" as well.

This one is a great article and I don't see it as related to the other pieces (causally yes, but topically no). So, not a problem.

Actually we usually downweight rapid follow-ups from the same site when there has been a major thread just recently (the intention is always to avoid too much repetition along any axis) but I took a look at this article last night and it was so good that I ignored that rule. A good article is more important than a good rule.

Regardless of your intentions, the demeaning title and snark of that post is fuel for flamewars.

Given that it's not the first time, one could reasonably conclude that it was on purpose.

It's a net negative to HN and users are on their right to flag should this kind of content appear again.

Not to mention that contrasting Go to Rust is a tired subject of little service to the software engineering community given their small intersection in usecases.

edit: 2 instant downvotes. I stand by what I say. HN is valuable because of curation and flamebaits being historically frowned uppon.

And yet here you are responding to a post that is asking we keep this thread on topic by trying to rehash said flameware.

My comment has a point: it is directed to the author because they do not recognize the blatant flamebait appeal of their posts even after all the drama.

Your comment, not so much.

My comment was a suggestion as to why you might be receiving downvotes.

This thread isn’t the place to exercise your need to express your disapproval and/or suspicion of the author regarding their previous posts. If you’d like to have a direct conversation with the author, there’s plenty of contact info on their website. All you’re doing is dragging this post down into more useless argumentation about something that has already been covered again and again in the previous posts.

You're just making it worse by trying to gatekeep whatever others should comment. My original comment has a point and is on-topic for the thread regardless if you agree or not. You're just dragging this unproductive and offtopic conversation you started.

Please stop dragging this needlessly with ad-hominem attacks.

nit: ad-hominem is attacking the person rather than what they’re doing or their argument, e.g. saying that someone is an idiot rather than refuting their argument. There’s nothing ad-hominem in any of my arguments: I’m just pointing out that what you’re doing is unproductive and off-topic and giving my opinion about why you’re being downvoted.

You could and reasonably did say the same thing about my arguing with you (that it’s unproductive), but that wouldn’t be an ad-hominem attack. You’re attacking my actions, not my person.

Still pointless and off-topic. I should have just flagged your first message and move on.

We both made HN a little less great today and I feel bad.

I try to reserve flagging for comments and posts that flagrantly violate the HN norms, since they are likely to create work for the moderation team. I don’t feel like any of our comments in this thread rise to that level, which is why I didn’t flag (or even downvote!) your original comment or any of your comments in this thread, despite its running afoul of the HN guidelines (assume good intent, don’t engage in flamebait or off-topic controversy, don’t comment about votes), although others seem to have.

It's rarely so deliberate. In fact it's basically never that deliberate because even if the intention were diabolically trollish (which is uncommon and I don't think the case here), HN is too random to respond reliably.

People are almost always just posting things they like/agree with and then other people, with different tastes and backgrounds, react differently. Sometimes by bursting into flames.

  All of her fingertips burst into flames
  All she could say was, "Oh extinguish them, James!"

  - Robyn Hitchcock

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