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Comment by jstummbillig | Hacker News Reader

It's really simple: Harassing people, who explicitly waived liability in a manner that agrees with the law, is never an okay strategy. That is not to say it can't be very attractive in the face of personal adversity or be very effective, in getting you what you want. Just it's never okay.

I am also somewhat puzzled how we are having a discussion about this on HN, where adherence to open source licenses is usually a virtue. Only as long as our work is not negatively effected, I presume?

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I simply cannot fathom the idea of harassing someone publicly on the internet to deal with a professional issue I face.

In fact, at every company I've ever worked for, damaging the company's reputation by doing that would have lead to far more serious issues at work than just finding a workaround and documenting it well - and then, if suitable, contributing back to the project with something helpful.

>I am also somewhat puzzled how we are having a discussion about this on HN, where adherence to open source licenses is usually a virtue. Only as long as our work is not negatively effected, I presume?

There are a lot of people on this site. Some of them may think differently than others, there is no way to fuse them into a single persona.

But that is exactly what we do by upvoting, statistically. There is a body of prior work to look at. Our collective stance on oss or mass surveillance is clear, and you can infer the resulting upvotes with certainty, statistically (might actually be a fun game).

The spirit of hn has clear biases and it's not equally open-minded towards all ideas.

A tiny subset of the site's users have accounts to vote with, and even less make use of it let alone make comments. Any guess about the "average" would be quite inaccurate. The stance of a vocal minority on X can be quite clear on a given thread, but even that is just the opinion of maybe 20-40 people.

And this is assuming there is no point manipulation at play, which is not the case for any popular site. In my opinion points alone can't be taken for more than a slight grain of salt.

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