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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

Surely you've been around HN long enough to know that you can't post like this here, or post personal attacks in general. No more of this, please.

And while I'm at it: please stop posting flamebait comments generally. We've asked you this many times, and you're still doing it. That's not cool.

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

Apologies; I didn’t realize that this was disallowed. I was sincerely curious and didn’t mean it as a flame or flamebait.

I don’t wish to cause any problems for you or HN. I will endeavor to post less.

Genuine question: why do you ask?

I pondered that myself and then realized we’d intersected on some security of iMessage stuff the other day, so it’s reasonable for them to ask “is this a marketing shill?”. Which to be clear I’m not, I think this stuff is interesting, just as I think the Google security posts are.

(I just googled and it does look like it’s not as obvious anymore, apparently DJ Olliej is much more popular :D)

It just would seem like a more interesting question if this post was a link promoting your private thoughts rather than a generic link to the public blog of one of the largest companies on earth. But maybe the question wasn’t really related to the post in particular.

Like I said we were talking about iMessage security in comments yesterday (or maybe this morning?) so presumably if the next time they saw my nick was in an Apple blog submission they became suspicious that I was a shill. Given that specific context I don’t think it’s wholly unreasonable to question things. The phrasin of the question is obviously unpleasant to me as it does come off as accusatory (due to the conspiratorial implication you get from the “no weaseling” text). But again if someone was a shill you probably would want a question like that. But I’d expect a shill to just not acknowledge the question - it is afaict being fairly heavily downvoted which I don’t think is reasonable either (because everyone loves fake internet points :) ) as that would benefit a shill/marketing person.

Anyway to be super clear again: anything I say is my personal thoughts and opinions and in no way reflects what any of my employers, past or present may be thinking or doing.

I guess I could put that in my HN bio? I hadn’t previously because I do try to separate my identity from my job, as when I first started out in tech I did not do that, and it was unhealthy.

From a quick look at their comment history, "sneak" doesn't like Apple very much.

I actually expected this to have already been posted and couldn’t find it - so the submission went through.

Anyway I haven’t ever gone out of my way to hide my employers, and I’m a tech worker in the Bay Area so I’ve worked a multiple companies including Google and Apple.

That said if you’d rather I delete this and wait for someone else to post it I can do that?

Obviously anything I say is my personal view and not reflective of my employers, past or present, and I’m only ever going to submit things that /I/ think would be of interest to HN.

[edited to make sentence that conform to silly societal rules like “must follow basic rules of English grammar”, “must not have absurd amounts of ambiguity”]

rather I delete this and wait for someone else to post it

You don't have to change the way you post just because someone is on some innuendo-laden crapcomment bender.

I get the innuendo, but it’s a reasonable thing to think about. The problem of course is that plenty of small companies, startups, and I guess blogs exist where someone might be proud of their work and want to share it on HN which I don’t think should be outright banned.

But then you also have the periodic content less and clearly marketing content that ends up on HN front page, which I always find deeply suspicious, so..?

It's reasonable and if you think something is wrong you mail hn@ycombinator.com. But there's no hunting woozles on the forum itself otherwise it would be an infinite woozle hunt, as you know.

Ah, I didn't realise that was considered a reasonable option - I mostly rely on downvote or (rarely)flagging

? Anyone can submit a story to HN.

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