Go and Chess AI are SERIOUS and REAL problem. It is something which goes back for thousands years and will be remembered for another thousands years.
AIDS and other contemporary diseases will be soon forgotten after their extinction.
AIDS and other contemporary diseases will be soon forgotten after their extinction.
Did the author edit his comment? This is what I see:
> Go and Chess AI are SERIOUS and REAL problem. It is something which goes back for thousands years and will be remembered for another thousands years.
> AIDS and other contemporary diseases will be soon forgotten after their extinction.
That is both civil and makes a substantive point. There is nothing trolling about it. Nor does it suggest that AIDS is either fake or unserious: it suggests that someday AIDS will not be a problem (I think that's very likely, in the sense that bubonic plague is no longer a problem).
I can only imagine two possibilities: the author's original post was trolling, uncivil or unsubstantive; or sctb had a knee-jerk reaction.
The namespace collision between Go and Golang infuriated me before I realized that--- Go has lasted thousands of years, and could very well outlast Golang. :D
Probably 11 times out of 12 when I see that one of the admins has marked something as off-topic, I disagree. Probably a quarter of those times I _strenuously_ disagree; the rest I can kinda see their point, but still think it was on-topic. It's rare that I think, 'thanks admin team, that was garbage and deserved to be detached!'
From what I've seen, the admin team does more harm than good. I think that their hearts are in the right place, and I completely appreciate that they don't want HN to devolve into chaos — but I think that instead they risk turning HN into an echo chamber in which only views considered mainstream in San Francisco & Boston are permitted (even when those views are considered extreme elsewhere), while those which are considered mainstream elsewhere are silenced.
Fun fact: did you know that kids don't get chicken pox these days? They all get immunized, so they don't go through the rite of passage that everyone who's 20+ plus has gone through. And it'll soon be forgotten. Which brings me to: Just because people forget about a disease we've cured doesn't invalidate that good that was done by the people solving that problem. The general public doesn't know about _most_ good things that were done to bring about the world we live in. There's still value in helping anyway. Doctors & researchers don't ask to be worshipped.
Even if we strongman Go and Chess and say that they are great at sharpening & maintaining one's mental facilities, have been integral and beneficial to military thought, and are immensely enjoyable, I don't think that the value of solving the Go and Chess problems compares to curing diseases.