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Comment by grupthink | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, but did you win the Putnam?

That one reply in that flame war is still hilarious so many years later. To anyone who didn't get the reference of Putnam https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079

tldr;

In 2007, an academic argues with PG and others. After long exchange, academic defensively states their own achievements.

Another user challenges academic with GP question, to which academic provides unexpected affirmative response.

I think you missed the point. Scroll up, it's the same guy :)

Haha. I did. That’s wonderful.

I don't agree with that phrasing. A lot of people on that thread seemed sure cperciva was some arrogant dickhead bound for failure, but tarsnap is going a lot stronger than many of them are. Also people in the thread were amazingly rude to him, while he seemed pretty polite to me.

I think you're giving cperciva too much credit. He was just as arrogant as people thought, and he was definitely defensive.

I wonder how many people will downvote you without looking at your username?

This thread is turning out to be better than the one from 2007...

I can't downvote, but I am glad you said something because I didn't look!

But does he refer to himself in the third-person? That's the pinnacle of arrogance.

cperciva rarely refers to himself in the third person, but it does occasionally happen.

More often, we refer to ourselves in the first person plural.

TIL. Sounded reasonable to me, so quite likely I'm arrogant too.

Tarsnap's still there though, so I'd say that's a good defense.

I didn't say that I was wrong.

But I was having a bad day, and I said things in a different and more abrasive way than I normally would.

wow, that’s one helluva response. HN in 2007 seems like a wonderful place

Like the featured article, HN threads - then and now - are pretty low-key in regards to participant introductions. Usernames are just text, no flair or qualifiers so the focus is on the speaker's content itself. `libria` is free to converse with `cperciva` as an equal peer which is nice, because most other IRL forums I'd be acutely aware that's not the case ;)

I like the part where someone calls cperciva's idea bad, he says what's bad about it then the founder of Dropbox replies saying they're just starting and it sounds like they're in the same space.

Pretty good bad idea

Interesting this reply and one above are from accounts that is rather new.

But just the once, though, huh?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com