All: please don't fulminate*. Perhaps you don't owe embattled billionaires better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
HN is a site for curious conversation, so please wait to feel some curiosity before you comment.
HN is a site for curious conversation, so please wait to feel some curiosity before you comment.
Hearby nominated as word of the day. Excellent.
The older I get, the more I find myself making spelling mistakes based on word pronunciation. Sometimes I use a totally different word than what I was thinking, which makes absolutely no sense unless you read it aloud. Then you realize what happened. Hopefully it is not early onset dementia. Though it would not be -that- early.
I think it isn't, and suspect we all have such quirks, especially at the interaction of writing and sound. I occasionally find, for no clear reason, that when I am trying to say a color name I will instead say another color with the same first letter (e.g., if I meant to say 'green', then I will sometimes say 'grey' instead). I am not so young either, but I have done this for as long as I can remember, and don't think I suffer from dementia ….
Notably, the book reads in a very modern way, it's a bit shocking to know it was written in the 1700s when stylistically, and according to its vocabulary, it feels so very modern.
Also I love how Gargantua sounds right. Just like Morlocks and Eloi. Language is fun.
Thanks, your pedantry is greatly appreciated, it makes HN fun and educational
Moreover, even if there were, (a) the OP has been on HN's front page for hours and is currently at #4, (b) this story has been heavily discussed on HN, with several major threads in the last few days alone, and (c) asking people not to fulminate doesn't mean they can't make substantive critical points—if anything it helps them do so.
> Moreover, even if there were ...
Makes sense. You have a much better view of that than me.
The old school, Sand Hill-style tradition of greed, pettiness, backbiting and double-crosses continues unchanged.
Do you have a source?
That tradition has gone out the window: https://twitter.com/breckyunits/status/1590858862504316928
If you're going to make a claim like that you should say why, and post links, so readers can make up their own minds.
I don't think anyone should be able to flag anonymously. Judges don't get to hide behind anon accounts when they hand out sentences. Not in America anyway. It's cowardly and dishonorable.
I don't mind when dumb stuff I submit gets flagged. But when something strikes a chord and rises to the top and then is flagged, we have a "make something people want, that the censors approve of", type of situation.
Actually users have been emailing us to complain about your submissions, and I've been trying to hold them off.
> it's most likely that users flagged your post
I think when users flag a post they should only be given that privilege if their account is under their real name and if it shows who flagged a post. I rarely flag a post but when I do I would always be willing to do so publicly and state why. Otherwise downvotes/lack of upvotes should be the only acceptable means of flagging.
Obviously you post under your real name, so if you flag anything then I of course can disagree but have no right to be upset as ultimately you are the final judge here and I respect that.
Otherwise downvotes/lack of upvotes should be the only acceptable means of flagging.
It's unlikely the site would have users of 15 years such as yourself if it ever operated like that. Or really any users.
The rule that we moderate less when YC or a YC startup is part of a story (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...) is about mods, not users. Users are free to flag things that they think don't belong on HN.
I understand if you have a disagreement with how flags work on HN—you're not alone in that. But it is a separate issue from the point raised upthread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33553556).
This makes it easier to answer questions that would otherwise feel like hard tradeoffs. In this case: should people be shouting angrily in a protesty way in HN threads? No—but not because protest is bad or unimportant. It's just incompatible with intellectual curiosity, and since we're optimizing for the latter, it takes precedence.
When people are protesting or doing battle, they tend to either repeat their most effective phrases (slogans, etc.) or to spontaneously vent their strong emotions (name-calling, etc.). But repetition and name-calling are clearly bad for curiosity. I believe these are even different neurological states: high indignation comes with a level of arousal that rules out the relaxed playfulness that curious conversation depends on.
I hope it's clear that this isn't a judgment about protest or indignation in general—those are as human as anything else and when they're called for they're called for. It's just relative to the particular mandate of this particular site. We're trying to play one game rather than the other.
Is that censorship? Well, that word has become so stretchy that you can apply it however you feel. But I'd say no, for the same reason that chess isn't crokinole. It isn't censorship to say you don't get to whack your opponent's bishop.
Just like programming languages - HN is neither the only forum in existence, nor does it need to serve the needs of every human in existence.
Please see the HN Guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."