The user you're responding to is Jason Scott of TIA.
(Googling "Jason Scott TIA" gives me "Dr Jason Scott is a Senior Research Fellow in the Tasmanian Institute of Agriculture" which doesn't explain much to me)
TIA = The Internet Archive (i.e. the victim of the DDoS).
>The user you're responding to is Jason Scott of The Internet Archive
I am shocked that any HN reader could be ignorant of this fact. Their director is a (controversial) Turing Award winner.
This could even be as simple as "Some aspect of the attack pattern is inconsistent with such a motive", or "We spotted the perpetrator credibly gloating about it". But just from IA's public statements, the pattern ("launching tens of thousands of fake information requests per second") is quite consistent with simple denial.
And not taking on the job of police when you don't know as much as you think you do, such as the speakers whose speech you presume to police.
You might not know the significance of "textfiles says no", but you do know that in general it's a thing that on HN, sometimes the rando is no rando, and you do know that you're not dang.
That's all it takes to avoid looking like a douche. And soon enough some comment or other would fill in the significance, from someone else looking like a douche and having it explained to them.
Jason could have added "Internet Archive here, it's not that." But he would have to say that in front of every comment he ever writes, which I think would get old for him and probably no small number of other people would criticize that too "yesss we know you work for IA FFS get over yourself..."
I think it's fine for him to just speak and let everyone else take care of themselves.
Sometimes. More often than many other places we could mention. But in the majority of cases, even here, a rando is a rando. And if the randos see the accepted conventions being ignored without comment it might encourage them to do it more.
> Jason could have added
I'd argue should have.
> But he would have to say that in front of every comment he ever writes
Only comments where it is significantly relevant, or in this case where his experience and proximity to the issue at have might be considered enough to ignore the standard commenting conventions.