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Comment by RamblingCTO | Hacker News Reader

The best thing about HN is that comments feel pretty temporary. I don't like the fact that I'm being analysed without my consent and put on public display. Not that there's anything remotely interesting about me on that page but it feels weird. Not everything needs to be analysed and we don't need to compete everywhere.

What I'm saying is: I like the focus on the content and that it's not about who said it.

It got me to remove my twitter handle from my bio though. If you could update that in your app I would be thankful.

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> The best thing about HN is that comments feel pretty temporary

I have a google chrome extension that lights up when there are HN comments for the page I'm on. If I organically discover a blog post and that lights up, then I will often read the comments even though it might have been posted years ago. There is often useful insight or context to be gained.

FYI to you and anyone reading this. Comments are the opposite of temporary. You can never delete them or edit them after a very brief initial window. So anything you say here can and might be associated with you forever. Either directly or nebulously as indicated by this tool.

I suppose the EU would like to have a word about being forgotten?

Just because an individual has the right, doesn't mean the other entities have the means or desire.

Pithy!

But I guess I'm still confused. If a vendor provides software that doesn't honor the right, how many times can they do that before they get in trouble?

In HN case, I'm sure an email would sort it out, however.

If they're not in the EU, probably "forever," especially if they are in one of the many countries that are politically indifferent or hostile to the EU.

Information flows freely worldwide. Regulations do not.

Since HN does not ask for a name or email, it's difficult to say that one is being 'remembered' by their comments.

If your username is your full legal name and city, I would say that's your own stupid fault (and I live in a GDPR country).

This makes sense. Thanks!

Yup, thanks for the reminder! I actually knew. And I'm sure they don't serve GDPR requests. But the comments become irrelevant after 24h so it feels like they aren't really temporary. It's always about the newest articles and stuff

> ...comments feel pretty temporary.

I know how you feel.

I felt that way, too.

But what I found was that 2 clicks away from any comment is a query like: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=RamblingCTO

Comments here have never been temporary.

Hacker News itself has for many years provided a free near-realtime API and a variety of large datasets to the world for the specific purpose of making it easy for anyone to analyze our comments here. (https://github.com/HackerNews/API)

No comments you write on the Internet have ever been temporary. They stopped even pretending to be so 20+ years ago.

Yes I know that. But they become irrelevant pretty quick. It's not like someone comments on a post from a year ago typically. That's what I mean

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