Donald Sutherland has died | Hacker News Reader

Donald Sutherland has died

bbc.com

360 pointstoomuchtodo135 comments

Goes to show how prolific he was that every top level comment in this thread is someone naming their favorite movie of his, and in every comment it’s a different movie

I liked him playing Wilhelm Reich (with a dash of Einstein) in Kate Bush's 'Cloudbusting'. A masterpiece of nonverbal performance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pllRW9wETzw

Edit: btw, that youtube page has great comments from people who worked on the video.

Edit 2: this is a surprisingly good article about it: https://people.com/how-donald-sutherland-ended-up-in-kate-bu...

Edit 3: and apparently he did it for free - https://twitter.com/DeusExCinema/status/1803855249741934709

Came here to post this. Here's more info about it:

From YouTube description: "The music video, directed by Julian Doyle, was conceived by Terry Gilliam and Kate Bush. The video features Canadian actor Donald Sutherland playing the role of Wilhelm Reich, and Bush playing the part of his young son, Peter."

From Wikipedia: "Reich's work on character contributed to the development of Anna Freud's The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936), and his idea of muscular armour—the expression of the personality in the way the body moves—shaped innovations such as body psychotherapy, Gestalt therapy, bioenergetic analysis and primal therapy."

"Following two critical articles about him in The New Republic and Harper's in 1947, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration obtained an injunction against the interstate shipment of orgone accumulators and associated literature, calling them "fraud of the first magnitude". Charged with contempt in 1956 for having violated the injunction, Reich was sentenced to two years imprisonment, and that summer over six tons of his publications were burned by order of the court"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Reich

I've got to resist the temptation to go on about Reich again but he's one of the more fascinating characters for sure: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que..., and his influence is greater than people realize. He hasn't been written out of history completely, but he's in limbo, probably because of the many taboos he broke. He was the only person whose books were burned by the Nazis, the Soviets, and the Americans (as you correctly point out).

> He was the only person whose books were burned by the Nazis, the Soviets, and the Americans

Wow, that's got to be a record. I'm going to take a deeper look. I've done breathwork, but didn't know it came from Reich.

It's fascinating stuff and way out of the mainstream, and yet his influences (e.g. bodywork, breathwork) have gotten more mainstream at the same time. Kind of a paradox.

IIRC... based on a journal kept by Reich's son as he was withdrawing from painkillers in a Swiss hospital after a motorcycle crash.

To me the 2 movies that defined him was the remake of Invasion of The Body Snatchers (that scene on the end still hunts me) and The Eye OF the Needle, where he interprets a German Spy called Fabber that discovery about Operation Double Cross and tries to reach a german U-Boat with the info.

Eye of the needle was one of those rare twofers: a very good book and a very good movie.

Looks like the movie is free on amazon prime right now.

True. This was the first book I ever read in english. Had to carry a pocket dictionary with it, but well worth the time.

I watched this as a kid in the 90's. I still think about he scene with the axe.

Yep, that final scene is soul-searing

His voice is I think one of the most distinctive in movies. If you like being haunted by scenes from slow-burn horror movies then I can recommend The Broken (2008) with Lena Headey.

That 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a classic. Well worth watching.

Highly recommend! I’m a huge horror fan and this is a solid flick

You get to see Leonard Nimoy in a whole new way, too.

I finally watched this within the last year. Blew me away. Although the movie came out only a couple of years before I was born, it feels so much like a "modern" movie.

I think Invasion is an example of a big change in how movies were being made that started in at least the late 70's that became more or less how lots of movies were made since the 80's. Its right up there with Alien in my mind.

Honestly it reminded me of back in school when I first read something by Mark Twain. I could never get interested in any of the period books and such that were required reading, but the first time I read something by Twain it was immediately compelling. Even though his works were nearly 150 years old at the time, the way he wrote in much more simple and direct text is more or less how most fiction has become since then. It made it so much more accessible to a young person than the overly flowery language of the time period.

Donald Sutherland as "Hawkeye Pierce" in M.A.S.H. made such an impression on when I saw this movie on its release as a very young teenager. I've pretty much never got along with authority since.

RIP Donald Sutherland.

I watched the entire M.A.S.H series when I was young and it made a similar impression. I watched it before the film though, so my brain couldn't fathom anyone other than Alan Alda as Hawkeye.

"We're the pros from Dover." https://youtu.be/GeDFijEc-5U?si=8kuEs4rY8xpyeSd6

Sutherland with Jane Fonda helped bring the anti-militarist anti-authoritarianism to actual soldiers in 1971....

> F.T.A. is a 1972 American documentary film starring Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland and directed by Francine Parker, which follows a 1971 anti-Vietnam War road show for G.I.s, the FTA Show, as it stops in Hawaii, The Philippines, Okinawa, and Japan.[1][2]: p.143 It includes highlights from the show, behind the scenes footage, local performers from the countries visited, and interviews and conversations with GIs "as they discuss what they saw in battle, their anger with the military bureaucracy, and their opposition to America's presence in Indochina."[3] Called by Fonda "a spit and a prayer production" it was far from a big budget Hollywood movie, or even a well-funded documentary. While the movie "is raw," it "underscores how infectious the movement of the 60s and 70s was", and chronicles both the Tour itself as well as the soldiers who came to see it and "the local talent of organizers, labor unions and artist/activists" in the countries visited

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F.T.A.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWAbhonmCOg

As a kid, I watched Kelly's Heroes whenever it was on TV and loved him in it.

It was a joy to see him in so many movies throughout the years. He always elevated everything he was in. Great actor.

See comment elsewhere about 'negative waves'.

I also loved him in Kelly's Heroes, which sadly isn't mentioned in the obits I've seen so far.

Kelly's Heroes is one of the best war movies in my opinion. He played Oddball very well. Oddball's line about how his commander was trying to get them killed since Normandy resonated with me.

My dad was an infantryman in World War 2 in the European Theater of Operations. His war book had a lot dead listed in it. He underlined the ones he knew. One was a lieutenant. I asked my dad about the lieutenant and my dad's response was, "He was a West Point asshole."

Being in a war doesn't make one a hero. Mostly you are fighting because you have to and your goal is for you and your buddies to survive.

That's how you motivate people to kill who normally would never ever want to kill:

You bond them to their workmates, and then you put them in a place where the other side is trying to kill all of them.

"We got our own ammunition, it's filled with paint. When we fire it, it makes... pretty pictures. Scares the hell out of people"

I love you Oddball :) I think you had some kind of profound effect upon me when I was in single digit figures of age and watched this film with my dad.. You rock man }:-8)

It's mentioned in this one.

One of my favorite movies! Glad to see it mentioned here.

I'm younger, so my first introduction to him was Hunger Games, and that's where I started following him as an actor. A great career all around. Was happy to see him in Bass Reeves, but sad to know that was his last piece (if IMDB is accurate).

Great actor. My favorite movie with him will always be the spooky Don't Look Now (1973) with Julie Christie.

Edit: originally had written the year as 1873!

That has got to be one of the earliest moving pictures of all time! Wow!

/s sorry, think you have a typo!

We're actually partial to 1971's Klute but that's because of an inside family story!

Lol, yes

Must be a fun story for sure. One of those movies that come to mind when one thinks of NYC in the 70s/post Moses-era

Disappointed this is the single mention of Klute here.

Phillip Kaufman's remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers..

M*A*S*H. Not for his performance, necessarily. It's just a great, fun movie. I'm watching it tonight.

I am going to go with Kellys Heros.

Anyone wanting to watch this movie (which is great) just go into it cold. Be warned that there's a pretty extended sex scene, but otherwise just go in without expectations.

> Be warned that there's a pretty extended sex scene, but otherwise just go in without expectations.

I want to push back slightly against the idea that's an "extended sex scene", or even that it's a "sex scene" at all.

It's one of the most beautiful sequences in all of cinema -- a grieving couple rediscovering intimacy and joy. The way it is intercut with them dressing, getting ready for dinner, the way you can see it brought happiness and affirmation and some sense that life is not over and love survived a terrible loss. It's central to the entire film: to why they are in Venice in the first place, to their commitment to each other, to their determined love for each other.

> It's one of the most beautiful sequences in all of cinema -- a grieving couple rediscovering intimacy and joy. The way it is intercut with them dressing, getting ready for dinner, the way you can see it brought happiness and affirmation and some sense that life is not over and love survived a terrible loss. It's central to the entire film: to why they are in Venice in the first place, to their commitment to each other, to their determined love for each other.

Also known as a "sex scene." And at a full five minutes, it's a rather long scene :-)

It's also one of the most notorious sex scenes in cinema from that era, with persistent rumors that Sutherland and Christie actually were doing the deed.

But I think you wrongly inferred that the commenter was trying to dissuade people from watching the movie because of it. I interpreted it just as a fair warning, lest you think it might be a fun pick for family movie night with the kids and grandparents.

> Also known as a "sex scene." And at a full five minutes, it's a rather long scene :-)

It has almost nothing creatively in common with sex scenes in almost any other movie ever made, which are usually (lazily, and often misogynistically) used to cheaply bond the damsel to the hero.

It's not a sex scene; it is fully and completely a love scene.

I can think of so few like it.

> It's also one of the most notorious sex scenes in cinema from that era, with persistent rumors that Sutherland and Christie actually were doing the deed.

Persistent, infantile, somewhat misogynistic rumours.

Buddy, when two people are having sex in a movie, it's a "sex scene", however you choose to explain the nuance.

>Persistent, infantile, somewhat misogynistic rumours.

What makes it "misogynistic"?

> Buddy, when two people are having sex in a movie, it's a "sex scene", however you choose to explain the nuance.

I'm not your buddy and I'm trying to draw what I think is a pretty important creative, cultural, artistic distinction. But if you don't see it, that's fine.

> What makes it "misogynistic"?

Have you ever considered how the balance of male and female nudity works in Hollywood? Who is always the most exposed?

As a result it's very nearly intrinsically misogynistic to suggest two actors really had heterosexual sex on a film set. The portrayal and the balance of power makes that clear.

(I mean consider how the distinction works if it is two men or two women... how do you decide what is portrayal and what is sex?)

> Have you ever considered how the balance of male and female nudity works in Hollywood?

Using balance and Hollywood in the same sentence looks strange to me.

I find most of Hollywood movies unbalanced.

> It's not a sex scene; it is fully and completely a love scene.

The love was expressed sexually. In a sex scene.

I understand that most sex in movies is poorly done, but that is a different discussion (and doesn't alter the plain-english meaning of the words sex or scene). No argument that sex is often a negative thing in films -- often causing the protagonist's downfall (an endless re-telling of the Garden of Evil parable). And of course, until very recently the woman was expected to be topless, though less so in the last few years since #metoo. There are exceptions, with sex-positivity and/or no female nudity.

> Persistent, infantile, somewhat misogynistic rumours.

Persistent, yes. But I'm confused why you think the rumors are infantile or misogynistic. At the time, people were shocked by the realism, and they reacted with "those two sure look like they're really fucking." How is that derogatory to Julie Christie??

Incredible that his career spanned 60+ years. When I saw him in _The Dirty Dozen_ it must've already been thirty years old.

This got me curious about who had the longest career in Hollywood. Mickey Rooney came in near the top at 90 years. [0]

[0] https://www.imdb.com/list/ls058627770/

True - although I don't understand the date discrepancy in that listing:

> lived 1920-2014 • acted 1926-2016

Could be a mistake or they're counting posthumous releases.

Don't Look Now is one of my favorite movies! So weird and spooky.

Don't Look Now is one of those unforgettable 1970s movies so ahead of their time, along with The Marathon Man and very few others. And it's spooky indeed, hard to bear if you've got a child. RIP

A bunch of his movies went through my mind (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, ...), but since nobody has mentioned it, The Italian Job (2003) (another remake).

He had a small amount of screen time, and maybe I'm just thinking about it because I like the movie generally, but I like the way he played the character for the short time he was on screen.

"I feel so optimistic.."

"Fine? You know what fine stands for, don't ya? ... Freaked out, insecure, neurotic, and emotional. .. See those columns behind you? ... That's where they used to string up thieves who felt fine."

The first movie I really remember seeing him in was Virus. By all accounts it is a pretty bad movie, but I liked it a lot as a kid and it scared the crap out of me.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120458/

Holy cow someone else who has seen Virus... what a bad but good sci-fi flick, and gross!

I might need to watch it again tonight.

_Wow_... I literally haven't thought of this movie in 25 years. I saw a bunch of trailers for it on TV as a kid and thought it looked cool but never got around to seeing it as I wasn't nearly old enough and forgot about it since. I might have to give this a watch tonight and close the file on it.

Wonderful monster designs for such a dumb movie. Quake2-style body-horror cyborgs but on the big screen.

It's a favourite of mine because the robots are almost all real, which is completely nuts. Today these would all be crappy CGI.

I've seen him in a few movies, often as an extra. One of my favs has to be "Space Cowboys" ... will probably (re)watch MASH and Space Cowboys this weekend in remembrance.

Space Cowboys is a guilty pleasure of mine, most people don’t seem to know about it. I think I’ll join you this weekend.

Thanks for the reminder, I forgot about Space Cowboys but remember liking it.

Why don't you knock it off with them negative waves?

Exactly the quote I was thinking of! Great movie!

I think "The Eagle Has Landed" is my all time favorite Donald Sutherland movie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eagle_Has_Landed_(film)

And as imperfect as it is, I've decided it's my favorite World War II movie.

Idolised that film and his role since I first saw it in my early teens. The romance sequences between Liam and Molly Prior ( Donald Sutherland and Jenny Agutter ) affected me quite a bit. If you’ve read the book and the sequel, they’ve got the casting dead-on. Can’t imagine anybody else playing those two roles. I think the first time I actually wept at a film was that last scene. He decides to head back to Ireland after the action, and she reads his last letter while walking on the same beach where they met. Just overall a very touching moment. I loved the way they recruit him. He says he likes his slow professor life, and the general tells him - that’s like a race horse pulling a milk cart! Donald then agrees to come on board - you have such a way with words!

Amazing, amazing film.

"Ordinary People" is an incredible film, with top-notch performances by DS, Mary Tyler Moore, Judd Hirsch, and a young Timothy Sutton. Highly recommend.

RIP Donald Sutherland.

Surprised nobody has mentioned it, but my favorite movie of his was Pride and Prejudice 2005 edition. He plays the father role extremely well - you can feel the emotion in the room.

Going to have to rewatch it this weekend in his honor.

The first image I have of Donald Sutherland is his character in The Great Train Robbery, which I think is a mostly forgotten movie which, for some reason, I was obsessed with as a teenager. Later, MASH and Kelly's Heroes, of course. He'll be missed, but his enormous catalog is a testament to his versatility.

Second the recommendation. Excellent movie, and excellently played by Sutherland opposite Connery.

Interestingly enough, I think The Great Train Robbery may have been one of the first Michael Crichton books adapted to film? https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0079240/ (check: nope, preceded by both Westworld and Andromeda Strain)

I went on a jog through historical heist films, and there's some amazing older stuff, e.g. Rififi (1955).

Since everyone is mentioning movies and television, I’ll go against the grain and mention his narration of Hemingway’s “Old Man and the Sea”. It’s a relatively short audiobook and he does a fantastic job.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Sutherland

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000661/

Hey that is interesting - IMDB's name folder is an indexed list... ordered by.... ?

nm0000001: Fred Astaire

nm0000002: Lauren Bacall

nm0000003: Brigitte Bardot

nm0000004: John Belushi

nm0000005: Ingmar Bergman

nm0000006: Ingrid Bergman

... It seems it is alphabetical, based on last name, but the first list must have been a very small select list, and then it rolls over around 9xx to start another list of people at A, etc etc....

I wonder how that database was populated / why that way.

Wasn't IMDB originally a hand curated text "database"? That might be why.

"Six Degrees of Separation" with Donald Sutherland and Will Smith was the first relatively arthouse movie I saw and it introduced me to the genre.

It's a great little gem, especially since it came out when Will Smith was near the peak of his "pop" persona, while the movie is definitely not.

The brief appearance in Animal House is a little gem.

They needed a major star, so John Landis got him to do it as a favor. He did all his scenes in one day. They offered him either $35,000 or two points (two percent of the film's gross). He took the $35K. The film made over $140 million.

At the time that movie was made, looking at everyone involved and lack of track records, I can totally understand why he made the decision he did.

Well yeah, on one hand, exactly. On the other hand, that's what the movie is about.

Either way - for a day's work, it's pretty good.

Bluesky feed for remembrances: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:qrllvid7s54k4hnwtqxwetrf/fe...

I liked his role as the pyromaniac in Backdraft.

I came here to post this - he was perfect for that role. He and Robert De Niro played off each other so well.

"Burn it all", great scene

I never had any real awareness of him as an actor (M.A.S.H was just a few years before my time), but as the best tribute I have at hand, a nugget of trivia:

Dragon Quest VII has a party member named Kiefer, the disobedient prince of the Kingdom of Estard (a wayward prince in Dragon Quest; quelle surprise). In the original game, his father's name was Burns, but the English translators for the 3DS remake decided that "King Donald" sounded better.

I'm feeling some negative waves.

https://youtu.be/ncbEucjsNFU?t=73

Saw him recently in 'A time to kill'. Great presence as always. Somehow he's always been a great addition to any movie cast.

This one is pretty obscure, he plays an elite open-heart surgeon at a time when the artificial heart seemed like it was just around the corner.

He shows the hubris of trusting technology in a way that was perfect for the early 80's. It's also an example of how cable TV was good for discovering movies in a way we can't really do today.

https://youtu.be/MWJr6r_Vz0g

As a Canadian, I've always been proud at how readily Donald Sutherland has played cultural ambassador over the years.

If you haven't seen Klute, today is a great day to do so.

My favorite is him as Bill Bowerman in Without Limits (1998)

One of my film history professors worked as a dailies hand on a film with Donald, and told us an anecdote how Donald would look at the dailies on a reel-to-reel Steenbeck-style film editor (pre-digital!). When he did this, he would take a jacket an throw it over his head and around the light-box and watch it in seclusion. A man dedicated to his craft!

I remember the surprise in seeing him in a very minor role in the 1967 The Billion Dollar Brain. He was playing a tape monkey for a huge mainframe, loading huge reels of magnetic tape into a Honeywell. It was fun to see the genesis of a great man's acting career.

One of my favorites of his is when he portrayed the protagonist's father in the point-and-click DOS game "KGB: Conspiracy"

http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/kgb-conspiracy-starring-don...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KGB_(video_game)

I think it's how I learned of him, when my dad bought me a 486 with CD-ROM, and some games on CDs in the 90's. That game even had footage of the 1991 coup attempt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUuiNcJKY4s

very similar story to me as a kid :)

He’s very good in backdraft

Don’t hit me with those negative waves so early in the morning!

I find it odd that I don't recall ever watching a movie with Donald Sutherland. MASH is one of the few Robert Altman films I still need to watch, so here we go.

Only one I can recall is Hunger games. But he looked familiar in those so i am sure there are others.

Little known fact. He wasn't just an amazing Canadian. He was a Maritimer, born and raised in my home town, Saint John, New Brunswick.

RIP Donald. When I saw the headline I initially confused him with Ivan Sutherland, who is getting up there in years, but thankfully is still with us.

Ivan Sutherland is still doing active research! I saw a great talk he gave last year on quantum flux circuits. He politely refuses to talk about graphics anymore, which (as a graphics person myself) is kind-of awesome.

A real loss. I've watched and enjoyed so many of his movies over the years. RIP good man.

Time to get grandpa Johann von Wolfhaus's ashes to Munich. Goodnight, popo.

Gotta watch M*A*S*H tonight with a martini that's drier than the Sahara Desert.

Pillars Of The Earth, anyone?

Also, his great one scene appearance as "X" in Oliver Stone's JFK.

Incredible monologue in that film.

One of my favorite works of literature and television adaptations. If someone ever had the perspicacity to create a streaming service showing nothing but Ian McShane performing scenes from Ken Follett books, I'd just hand them my wallet and never leave the house again, haha.

oddball: "a sherman [tank] can give you a very nice edge"

one of my favourite quotes.

goodbye, Donald.

Fellini's Casanova and his over the top performance.

I guess Elliot Gould is hotter now.

Long live Oddball!

Is the whole internet gaslighting me? Hawkeye was played by Alan Alda and I’m kinda offended that anyone would attribute the role to anyone else but I’ve read a bunch of comments on different websites that make it seem like people remember him as Hawkeye.

The Altman film came first, starring DS as Hawkeye. The TV show starred AA.

You'd have to know MASH was a movie first :)

Gary Burghoff played Radar in the film and TV series. Timothy Brown was in both, but played two different characters.

“I trust everyone. It's the devil inside them I don't trust.”

Even in his appearances in not-so-great movies you could tell Sutherland was trying to rise above the material. Actually, I got that impression of him from all of the really good (or just good) movies he was in. Not to mention all of the TV he did, too. Really enjoyed his turn in an episode of The Avengers called "The Superlative Seven".

Was briefly concerned until I saw it wasn't Ivan Sutherland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Sutherland

What has this to do with Hacker News?

Because Kelly's Heroes is the world's finest movie and revolves around an intra-preneurial enterprise that hacks the mechanism of war for personal profit.

Basically its like Office Space and Three Kings rolled into one.

Thanks for the recommendation

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40743833

Don't worry, they made a copy of him just for this sort of eventuality.

Confused him with Ivan Sutherland and got very sad for a moment.

Don't know who Donald Sutherland is.

Love Donald Sutherland, sad to see him go.

That said, I think this is the signal that it's time to walk away from HN. It used to be a place for people to talk about technology, business, tech startups, and SV culture. Now it's celebrity news.

Bye!

HN has always had a wider range of content than people tend to assume it has, and that's by design—when pg renamed it from "Startup News" to "Hacker News", that was the reason: https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html.

For example, we had this thread 3 weeks after your account was created: RIP Michael Jackson - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=674438 - June 2009 (158 comments)

And of course the "How is this even remotely hacker news?" question was already in full swing back then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=674461

In other words, twere ever thus!

This approach only works as long as no one class of story is over-represented to the point of being predictable, but that's ok because evading predictability is one of the core values of the site:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

This is my 3rd account, my 1st was made like a month after yours.

Ahh yes, Donald Sutherland, never did a Startup but of course he was a notable Hacker. And of course his impact on world culture was right up there with Michael Jackson.

I find your attempt to defend the trajectory of the site very convincing and I withdrawal my criticism. Lets get more celebrity news up on the front page, like it used to be... The fact that there was one article about Michael Jackson within a few months of when I created my 3rd account is absolutely evidence of whatever point you are making.

I mean just look at all the articles about celebrities and politics and social policy: https://web.archive.org/web/20091207051053/http://news.ycomb...

VS the frontpage RIGHT NOW, which does not have even one single article about programming, and very few about technology even in the broadest sense.

I haven’t been around long, I am not someone you would look up to either but… I guess some “hackers” like movies and I’ve enjoyed picking up some recommendations here. I have no idea who David was, for example.

Also, no doubt you know this but this is my landing page: https://news.ycombinator.com/best

I guess if this site truly devolves into Silicon Valley-TMZ+ I’ll eat these words but there’s still science and computers here.

Best to appreciate it as people who are interesting enough to be icons for tech professionals.

It's interesting you picked 2009-12-07 for that archive link. When I click the right arrow on that page to go to the next snapshot, I get 2009-12-09: https://web.archive.org/web/20091209034602/http://news.ycomb... and the #1 story is "China's Family Planning Goes Awry" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=984930). If that's not social policy I don't know what is!

The point is that HN has always had a mix of things, and it's also always had these "how is this even on hacker news" and "I guess HN has turned into $Badness News now" comments. Most often the complaint is about too many political stories, but a certain number of those have also always been here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869.

The reason for this dynamic (the mixture of topics, and also complaints about the mixture of topics) is not hard to find: it was pg's vision for the site. If you want to argue about pre-2008 HN we could probably find more common ground, but that's getting pretty obscure. I think 16 years is enough to set a precedent.

Picked that date 100% at random, literally the only one I even clicked.

What is your point exactly? I think you would have trouble saying more words without saying anything falsifiable. I am not just being a jerk, I have no idea what your point is other than to try to put up a wall of text. If I was going to sum it up, "HN was always bad so it's still just as good as it was". This kind of defense works for 4chan because it openly brags about being bad, but I don't think this is what HN aspired to.

My point was that HN hasn't changed in the way you said it has.

On another note: your comments frequently do come across as being a jerk, and quite an unpleasant one. I don't usually address that so directly, and especially not after a personal interaction, but I think in this case it might be helpful (at least I hope so).

This has been a problem on HN for a long time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39610617 (March 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20067503 (June 2019)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19237577 (Feb 2019)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13003328 (Nov 2016)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10933740 (Jan 2016)

-- and I'm afraid it's still a problem (quite apart from this thread). I assume you don't mean to come across this way, because you frequently say things like "I am not just being a jerk", "I don't want to sound too critical" and so on, but that's not enough when you go on to say aggressive, insulting, and/or snarky things to the other person.

I'm not sure what to add beyond the same "would you please review the site guidelines and use HN in the intended spirit" that we've already been asking you for years. If you do intend to be a good contributor, I think the only way to do it is to double-check what you're posting and meticulously edit out the swipes. My guess is that your posts are coming across as nastier than you believe they are, so it's necessary to adjust in the opposite direction, and not by a small amount.

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

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