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Comment by jamescostian | Hacker News Reader

Tangent: somehow every single one of your comments was downvoted, even this non-inflammatory, informational one where you replied to someone and they ended up agreeing with you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18740217

I upvoted a few of your comments that were clearly non-inflammatory and useful. But I'd like to tell everyone who's blindly downvoting you, please read comments before downvoting them, instead of just downvoting everything you can that's tied to the person you disagree with.

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Well, unvote them, because this makes no sense: "He could not have ever exfiltrated that data to begin with as he gave the drive back"

Think about it. The USB device was for transferring data to something else. That might have been a personal device with a cellular data plan.

Sure, he gave back the USB drive. He didn't physically take that to China, or intend to do so. Those files were on it for a reason though, and that reason is transferring them to something that gets the data to China.

In the post you're replying to, I included a link that does not contain the sentence you quoted. In fact, that link shows the person making a valid correction. If you read it, you'll see why I upvoted it.

The entire point of the comment I made (which you replied to) is not that baybal2 is correct (in fact, I have no idea/opinion of whether they are correct about the defendent being innocent). The point is that ad hominem attacks through downvotes are a bad thing.

PG has maintained from the beginning that HN comments need not be upvoted for civility alone. “I disagree therefore I downvote” is valid etiquette on HN. I’m not going to stop doing that.

I imagine his comments have been downvoted because he's cherrypicking information from the article to defend the man across multiple comments. See the parent comment to your comment where he ignores that he did access and download files he had no right to access and instead states exactly the opposite according to the facts (in point 2).

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