Hacker News Reader

Comment by pvg | Hacker News Reader

It's a curious forum we're on where on one day there are jiggabytes spilled over how journalists get technical things wrong and on another, they're so reliably accurate, technology organizations making the case reporting on them is inaccurate must have been infiltrated by men in black and have had hapless employees flashed with a neuralyzer.

View on HN

Can you please not post unsubstantive comments?

HN has 5M monthly users. Obviously there isn't going to be any consistency.

It's not an 'unsubstantive' comment. There is a very large section of users who are ardent believers in the 'Gell-Mann amnesia' effect. There are also seemingly many, many users, as the one I'm replying to and many who've posted similar, highly voted comments on this thread whose explanation for the discrepancies between the reporting on this story and the company responses amount to (in my view) to MiB but with different acronyms. I find that curious. Maybe you don't, maybe you think those users don't overlap much or at all, that's fair enough. But 'things people find curious about HN that you think maybe aren't' is not 'unsubstantive' so get of my case, oppressor!

This is a rare instance where I agree that 'dang has jumped the gun. I don't see how your comment is insubstantial either, and I think HN's weird relationship with the news media is worthy of comment. No reasonable person reads the comment above to mean "literally everyone on HN has inconsistent beliefs about the press".

> HN's weird relationship with the news media is worthy of comment

If I had said something about trusting Bloomberg or the media then sure. But that’s a completely different topic that’s not even remotely related to whether Apple’s denials on potential NSL issues are reliable.

How are those two topics not intimately related? The question of how reliable Apple's employees are is only relevant to the extent that you believe Bloomberg's reporters were competent in sourcing the story.

Thanks, now I'm regretting not going with the pithier 'ur mom has 5M monthly users' a little less.

Apart from that not being remotely what's being said, HN is not one person, it's a lot of different people with different opinions, commenting on different articles.

I'm not sure what is 'remotely not being said' and I have some vague understanding of the idea HN is not one person.

But there are definitely two (among many) strong tribes of HN-popular belief - let's call them the Gell-Mannicheans and the National Security Epistoleros. It's weird (to me) that they rarely meet in threads on stories concerning both! That could be because they live in different timezones or have different interests. It could be that the Epistoleros are just that much more numerous or that for some people epistolerism trumps gell-mannicheism. Or something else altogether. I find it a curious thing to observe and think about - it's not some underhanded 'zomg lolz, I have caught you in logic error' comment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com