3,901 karma · joined October 15, 2012
Edit: See edit above. The question isn't whom to blame, the question is how to resolve the issue. Blaming people doesn't generally resolve an issue, but enforcing it or putting in place mechanisms for preventing it or some other tangible action might.
> Is the game responsible for people littering?
I feel like you didn't answer my question?
Edit, to clarify: I'm asking what the actual solution is: expecting the city to pay for skyrocketing enforcement? Or letting the park get trashed and then blaming the citizens? Or just closing the park and blaming people for it happening? etc.
This seems like a legitimate issue though. How do you propose it be solved?
I suppose in addition you'd naturally hope for me to assume this was a totally unbiased decision not at all associated with the fact that I had recently criticized your treatment of another user immediately beforehand publicly, right? I was so happy I'd found a moderator who really seemed to want to treat people well and equally, and instead what I'm seeing now is a moderator who instead turns around and actively follows his critics to stab them in the back silently. Never mind the normal process of giving them a warning or some other signal that you think there might be anything wrong with their behavior at all.
And I'm sure you're going to claim this was a totally independent decision and not anything revenge-like on your part, which I'm supposed to again believe despite so much direct evidence to the contrary, and I'm sure you cannot comprehend how someone with good intentions could possibly think otherwise. Like you've said yourself before -- it's not like the dynamics aren't well-known. Shame on me and my naiveté for thinking HN mods would be able to take some criticism and treat a critic like a normal user instead of looking for a way to stealthily get e-revenge at the guy who gave it.
Edit:
Regarding "this subthread" also being off topic, which I just noticed -- I didn't recall that rule, so my bad on that. Now that I've already written this, though: like I said before regarding your moderation of the previous user: I would've expected a warning or some other kind of moderation that's like a normal treatment. Not a silent stab like this, especially given the surrounding context. It's extremely hard to view things generously when you moderate things you disagree with so harshly and unusually.
Edit: I couldn't even post this because I've been supposedly "posting too fast" when I've only had ~5 comments in the last day. Are you causing/influencing/related to this in some way? I had never seen this happen before but ever since our last conversation I have seen it happen twice, both when you have been around the thread.
I did some searching now and it seems that intent to deceive/defraud is required at least in some states. Common sense would say you wouldn't get any company shares or other things until your check clears, so if it bounces, is it actually fraud? Or just being a jerk?
> {informed comments}
A little off-topic but I see this so often I feel like I should mention this at some point:
I think you mean "disclosure" and not "disclaimer" (and most likely it's best if both are omitted and you just mention you're a neurologist).
"Disclaimer" means refusing to accept responsibility, which doesn't make sense when it's a preface to what looks like a comment based on expertise. If, on the other hand, you're really trying to say that you're refusing any responsibility for what you say, then the disclaimer should probably be something more along the lines of "I'm NOT {a qualified lawyer/neurosurgeon/whatever}", and not "I AM {a qualified whatever}".
Edit: I just did some digging around and it seems they didn't have a bar for Neil Armstrong's death either, so this seems right on the mark so far.
My first worry was that your measurement would be wrong, not that the power wouldn't be killed! Any redundancy on that side? Or was it not necessary?
Well, I'm not the one who said what the father did was unreasonable, so you might have meant to reply to someone else. I merely said I thought the argument provided for that stance was reasonable. Happy to say the same about an argument for the opposite stance as well when I see it too. The fact that I might find an argument reasonable that doesn't mean I find it convincing and necessarily agree with the conclusion.
Says the guy who translated "actively go around risking your life" into "taking risks"?
> That's an argument for having life insurance; it's not necessarily an argument for not taking risks.
Yeah, because fathers can be replaced with money and children wouldn't feel a thing.
Without actually taking a stance on the topic, it seems quite a reasonable argument that, while you have a young child, you shouldn't actively go around risking your life -- they're your dependents, i.e. it's not just your life you're messing around with. When they stop being your dependents, do whatever you want, it's just your life now (and I guess your spouse's, who is presumably fine with what you do).
No worries, thanks for responding this time.
> I guess I just don't share your perception at all? I didn't call him a nationalist and didn't flame him. I wrote, "The only place to keep Hacker News as a place for things that gratify intellectual curiosity is to keep it free of nationalistic indignation, however justified." This phrasing is deliberately general (i.e. about HN as a whole) and impersonal (e.g. "nationalistic indignation" as a genre).
Honestly, this doesn't even pass the laugh test. Just look at what little sense this makes:
1. You said the OP was making a "swipe" at Saudi Arabia, when (a) the OP was simply using it as a reference point, and (b) literally no one else's reply to that comment took any issues with what was said about Saudi Arabia (whether in terms of accuracy, or in terms of civility/offensiveness, or anything else). And the replies about Hezbollah and whatnot were to someone else's comment entirely. But you still thought it was somehow provocative... okay, fine. Now here's the ironic part:
2. At the same time, the OP felt the need to immediately defend himself by saying "i am not nationalist" in a direct reply to your comment where you used the phrase "nationalistic indignation". This means he himself (a) felt your comments were directly targeting him, and (b) that you had accused him of being a nationalist. Someone else took it the same way too, and replied that his comment wasn't nationalistic. And now you, a moderator who seems to be trying very hard to understand things from others' perspective, are suddenly claiming that you in fact "didn't call him a nationalist", and that your statement was in fact "deliberately general (i.e. about HN as a whole)", not about the OP. In other words, he made a comment, you thought it was offensive to Saudi Arabia, no one else had an issue with it, but your view stands. Okay, fine, let's go with that. Then the opposite happened: you made a comment, which made him go into a personally defensive mode directly about what you said, someone else also defended him for the same thing, and now you're denying that you were accusing him of nationalism and that it was just some general statement about HN. I'm assuming you're writing this all with a straight face, but being completely honest with you here, it's so ironic and goes so directly against what actually happened that I'm having quite a hard time even reading it with a straight face, let alone being remotely convinced by it.
First: it bothers me that you responded to everything EXCEPT what I had clearly indicated to have been the most important part of my last comment (I marked it as "VERY important")! I can't tell if that means you agree with it, or if you disagree with it, or if you have no idea what to say, or if you forgot to respond to it, but it was literally the only part of my comment that I really hoped for a reply to (which I mentioned in the first line), reproduced here:
>> Second (VERY important), I do think your initial response was excellent. But in your second reply you suddenly went off the mod-rails and provoked a far more awful response when you started calling him "nationalist". Until this point, no particular person had been targeted, and the entire chain had been civil. (Again -- I very much admired how professional and otherwise excellent your initial reply was.) Yet you suddenly derailed and single-handedly flamed him like this. That was just awful and I really did not expect to see it from a mod who's trying to teach users how to avoid provoking others. It honestly made it that much harder to take the rest of what you said seriously and, IMO, completely sent across the wrong message.
Second:
> In your analysis of the original comment you skipped over "Iran is not Saudi Arabia or anything like that". To me that means you're not reading the comment nearly closely enough to assess how provocative these things are.
Interesting! I'm not sure if this is a case of a misunderstanding. I didn't skip over it at all, but rather it never struck me as provocative at all, and it still doesn't. Let me put the context around the quote, because I think it is crucial:
>>> despite our theocratic regime, really I have to mention, Iran is not Suadi Arabia or anything like that. Girls and Boys do get the almost exactly same education, they have great opportunity to be a successful scholar in any branch of science they want
"Despite our theocratic regime" indicates pretty well that this isn't intended to be an Iranian-Saudi fight. There was no hint of the topics that usually come up when that topic arises (notably terrorism and funding of such). The author is clearly not happy with his own government either (again: "despite our theocratic regime"), so the nationalism accusation seems off too. The quote "anything like that" is clearly intended to refute the counterargument "OK, they're not the same, but they're pretty darn close right?". Best as I can tell, Saudi Arabia is pretty clearly chosen here as a point of comparison because it is much more likely to be well-known to and well-understood by the readers, and everything stated after it is merely drawing comparisons using as unbiased- and undisputed-facts as possible. You could honestly substitute any countries here with similar facts ("Italy is not Greece, we haven't defaulted in our history [I think this is true? not sure]", "Turkey is not Iran, despite our Muslim heritage we don't require women to have head coverings", "Britain is not America, we don't allow people to carry guns in public", etc. are some I can think of) and I would feel the same way: it's not provocative at all, it's just stating a well-known, pretty undisputed fact to draw a comparison to illustrate differences that are clear to the writer but not the reader. (If you still find the comment provocative despite all this, I guess we can agree to disagree here. Again, this entire issue is secondary to my first comment above.)
Thanks for the replies!
I'm not sure how to interpret what this means. What do "consistent" and "safe" mean? Is safety about not corrupting program data? Even when dealing with Python arrays, I can end up corrupting my arrays one way or another (off by one, race conditions, etc.). Is "consistent" about going days without a bug? Because I can't do that in any language. If not, what do these mean? It'd be really nice to know what other languages he can write safe code in, so we can have something to compare to.
Hm, maybe because you'd get twice the gravity and a "day" that lasts closer to 24 hours than 24 days?
> "Threatening an immediate ban" is not accurate. I led with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14776923. The commenter responded with "I wanted to started this flamewar", which they subsequently edited to say "didn't wanted" (presumably this was a language misfire). Moderation replies can indeed look pretty bad when the comments to which they're replying have been edited to say the opposite of what they originally said!
Okay, fair enough, but honestly I feel like as a mod, in the context of the grammar errors and the nature of the rest of the comment (as well as the fact that you wouldn't expect for someone to so quickly admit "I wanted to to start a flame war"), you could've/should've probably realized it was a language issue. Did it honestly not strike you as odd that you'd get a response like this, and did you honestly not expect this might be the case? (Not an actual question I'm expecting a reply to -- I just mentioned it since I think it's worth thinking about.)
> When I ask someone not to start flamewars and they respond by not receiving the feedback and instead saying that they wanted to do it, this is usually a sign that an account doesn't mean to use the site as intended.
How often does this even happen? Do you people ever immediately admit they want to start a flame war? Again, see above. (Again, not necessarily expecting a reply -- just letting you know this is what I'm thinking as I read this part of your comment.)
> When I showed up the thread was already full of angry arguments about Hezbollah and 9/11. Perhaps you haven't read those comments? Some of them are probably flagged by now.
Those comments deserved to be burned with fire. But that's not really an excuse for such a public e-slapping of a different user who put a pretty civil comment whose entire goal was to promote something a peaceful view. (Yes, I have read your rebuttal to this... addressed below.)
> And yes, obviously the original comment wasn't nearly as toxic as the ones that followed. What you guys seem to be missing, though, is that the comment that sparks a flamewar is responsible for what it sparked. It's not as if these dynamics aren't well understood and entirely predictable.
Responsible to some extent, yes, but (a) you can't generally expect users to understand and predict these dynamics as well as a moderator like you, and (b) one is not entirely responsible for everyone else's response to a situation. Moderating such a comment (editing/deleting/etc.) is completely fine. But to go out of your way to publicly shame him in such an unprecedented and strong fashion that so many of has had not even seen before is what struck me (and I suspect others) as utterly disproportional, especially when the topic is kind of sensitive. Not trying to suggest that you should make this a regular thing, but I think if at least if it had been a regular thing, it'd have been less problematic.
However, one additional important (and non-meta) thing I want to note regarding "sparking a flamewar" itself is below.
> If you read that original comment fairly you won't miss the obvious (if unintentional) provocations it contained.
2 things:
First (less important), I only see one potential example of this, which is the use of the term "Right-wing media". <biased>I think it requires a bit of a thin skin to be insulted by someone saying that "$direction-wing media" is portraying my country and people inaccurately, especially given what we regularly see on HN, but whatever.</biased> I don't see anything more than that, so the pluralization of "provocations" and calling them "obvious" does bother me.
====> Second (VERY important), I do think your initial response was excellent. But in your second reply you suddenly went off the mod-rails and provoked a far more awful response when you started calling him "nationalist". Until this point, no particular person had been targeted, and the entire chain had been civil. (Again -- I very much admired how professional and otherwise excellent your initial reply was.) Yet you suddenly derailed and single-handedly flamed him like this. That was just awful and I really did not expect to see it from a mod who's trying to teach users how to avoid provoking others. It honestly made it that much harder to take the rest of what you said seriously and, IMO, completely sent across the wrong message.
> You guys are right about one thing, though: I haven't done a good job of explaining how I intervened in the thread, to judge by how much pushback my comments received. When that happens, I take it as a sign of something wrong in my approach. In this case the reason is that I was running out the door on my way to a workshop, and moderation in haste is never a good idea. Now I'm running back to the same event (late!) so my last half-dozen comments may not be much better, but I hope I've at least given more background explanation.
This is a great response here (and I agree that running out while typing a mod comment is not a great idea!) and yes it definitely helps. But my worry is less about the explanation for your response and more about the response itself -- see the last point above.
Cheers~