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Comment by ohithereyou | Hacker News Reader

Shitposting and its consequences have been a disaster for Intenet discourse.

Your point would be more plausible if you weren't responding to someone who's been "shitposting" on the internet (your "Intenet") for over 30 years and whose "shitposting" has been highly educational for generations of people, including me — especially HCI researchers, of course.

Nobody is above the law.

The "law" you are proposing is a bad one, based on either faulty observations or a value system so out of keeping with my own that it might as well belong to the Ayatollah Khamenei.

Since my post hasn't broken any laws, and I haven't murdered anyone, or sent any bombs in the mail, let's give phlakaton the benefit of the doubt and assume good faith, that he's not making baseless accusations, and by "shitposting" he's referring to the actual convicted murderer Ted Kaczynski, who posted bombs in the mail that killed 3 people and injured 23 people.

Unless he can cite any criminal codes I've violated or people I've murdered, I'll assume phlakaton is not just being histrionic and totally overreacting by calling my post "a disaster for Intenet (sic) discourse", or accusing me of murder.

Speaking of melodramatic shitposting about network based disasters and the triumph of Worse is Better, from the Unix-Haters handbook which included a chapter on Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big:

The X-Windows Disaster:

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-x-windows-disaster-128d39...

>X: The First Fully Modular Software Disaster

From The Unix Haters Handbook:

https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf

>The Rise of Worse Is Better, By Richard P. Gabriel. p. 311.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unix-Haters_Handbook

>Contents

>The book concerns the frustrations of users of the Unix operating system. Many users had come from systems that they felt were far more sophisticated in computer science terms, and they were tremendously frustrated by the "worse is better" design philosophy that they felt Unix and much of its software encapsulated.

Sir, I refer of course to the law of social discourse that most of us adhere to which says you don't bring Kaczynski completely out of left field to a HN discussion and not get called out for your foolishness. No matter your assumed eminence in the community. You are neither half as amusing nor clever in this moment as you think you are.

Give it a rest.

Citations, please. I don't remember that particular law. Can you give me a link to it, please? Is there a Wikipedia article on it? Is it this one?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_climbing_the_Reic...

I didn't post the Unibomber manifesto. Quite the contrary: I was dismayed that Ted Kazinsky's manifesto was beating out Richard Gabriel's manifesto, so I pointed it out to dang, the HN moderator, who flagged it and knocked it off of the front page.

Did you report it too, or did you [quavering melodramatic Dudley Do-Right voice] just sit by silently and say nothing while evil was being perpetrated?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q83Jqd2h0Yg

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