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Comment by 0des | Hacker News Reader

I get what you're trying to say, however this is a flawed assumption right up there with just getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. Time and innovation are both not on your side, in this case. Complex systems are complex and extend far beyond the focal depth of our squinting.

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Wöhler proved in 1828 that there was nothing special with organic molecules by synthesising urea.

I guess you could view molecular formation as a complex system involving atoms and atoms as a complex system involving quarks. That would define chemistry and particle physics as the study of said complex systems which makes sense to me. Still at that level that’s not generally viewed as the study of organisms. What we view as biology, the study of the mechanisms of life, really starts at the molecular level. If you go lower, things stop being specific enough.

I genuinely don't understand what your analogy is supposed to convey, could you elaborate?

It's a reference to an old HN comment back when the creation of Dropbox was announced here. Someone commented something along the lines of "you could just" do that whole thing with the FTP server etc. It's lived on as an example of "peak HN" attitude.

So any form of disagreement with someone can be reframed as being dismissive and missing the point, and therefore "peak HN".

That's quite the non-starter for any discussion about whether an idea holds up under scrutiny.

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