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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Please don't be repetitive in HN comments, though. Repetition is the enemy of curiosity and curiosity is the core value here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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> Repetition is the enemy of curiosity

I haven't found a source for that, but I don't believe it to be true and I'm curious why you do.

I haven't seen the previous comments of the OP so for me this comment was useful.

But if you had seen the previous comments, that is, if you'd experienced repetition instead of new information, then they'd have been less curious and less useful. Curiosity wants to find new things, learn new things—it basically wants diffs because diffs are what it finds interesting. My source? Self-observation and observation of this community. Is it really a controversial point?

Even when we mark stories as dupes there are often users who say it was new to them and they appreciated the post. That makes perfect sense. No one sees everything, and if you haven't encountered the earlier elements of a repetitive sequence, then for you there is no repetition. I'm always reminded of a second-hand clothing store in my home town called "New to You".

But at a site-wide level it's not hard to understand that this is a stochastic process and we have to manage it globally. The alternative would be not to moderate repetition at all, and the community would definitely not prefer that.

What would be the proper way of informing those who are interested in the topic about available alternatives? I assume not everyone follows the same topics and there may be people who see the presented information and the relevant references for the first time.

You know the sort of person who comments 'Just install Linux' in every thread about more or less any kind of computer problem? You don't want to be that sort of person. If you're starting your comments with 'I'm not going to stop telling you to install Linux', it's probably a good time to check if you're not turning into the sort of person who's always telling you to install Linux.

If I ommited that first part of the sentence the points made afterwards would remain the same. I did so to indicate that it's not the first time the Rust community suggests that something should be (re-)written in Rust for memory-safety reasons, in a project that has a well-established C-codebase. I'd argue it's the same "Just install Linux" situation that you mention, and that "Linux" may not be the answer.

it's not the first time the Rust community suggests that something should be (re-)written in Rust

The article is not about that, though, it's specifically about the various issues surrounding the use of Rust for Linux kernel development.

The Rust community is not advocating that, it’s kernel developers that are interested in writing new components in Rust.

So no proposal of rewriting by any Rust developers

And 'ghostwriter stated elsewhere in this thread that the previous round of these comments was in reply to an article talking about how QEMU should start to develop new device backends as out-of-process Rust programs - which also was not about outsiders proposing a complete rewrite, either.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24133292

http://blog.vmsplice.net/2020/08/why-qemu-should-move-from-c...

Perhaps the most long-lasting harm of the Rust Evangelism Strike Force has been the rise of the Anything But Rust Counterinsurgency, who sees that someone, somewhere, is thinking about Rust, and needs to convince them that they're making a mistake.

At the very least, please include links to your previous comments, so that any refutations of your previous comments can be seen by others - otherwise we will all have to repeat ourselves until there is no room for any new discussion. (One of the other replies pointed out that you had not incorporated an objection that someone made to your previous comment.)

I, for one, am glad that you chose to comment as I had never heard of ATS before. Thank you.

I think if you absorb the responses from other users here, and adapt your future comments more to the specifics of a given story, that should help a lot. geofft makes a good point about linking to past points rather than repeating them. That's the way to handle repetition on HN. Don't inline generic material from before—refer to it via links.

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