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Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

I'm flagging this, although I have mixed feelings about doing it. I think it might be fine as a blog article, but from Wired it just looks too much like pandering.

Sounds too much like "<PROVOCATIVE NERD-BAIT QUESTION X> Commented on by <FAMOUS UNRELATED PERSON WHO IS ALSO PROVOCATIVE>" It's just too easy to kick out dozens of these things.

Since it's the weekend, here's a few samples to show you what I mean (all of this is made up, of course)

"Functional Programming Not Worth Learning Says Al Gore"

"Paul Krugman Discloses His Favorite Unix Editor"

"Bush Reveals His Opinion on Advanced SEO Techniques"

"Lunar Colony Better Than Mars Mission: Michael Moore"

"James Cameron on Why Higgs Boson is Important"

You could do this all day. Lots of fluff and food for chitchat, nothing much useful.

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Except that Chomsky is not completely unrelated, as your examples are. Ayyadurai is a colleague of Chomsky. Ayyadurai was a student of Chomsky close to to the time in question. Ayyadurai's claim centers around the semantics of the term "email", an area of expertise for Chomsky.

I usually don't deep-dive into threads, but I think my comment about flagging and your reply deserves an explanation.

Take a look at the comments on this article. Most of them are about Chomsky as a provocative person and how it relates to the question of email origins, not the issue itself. Famous-Provocative-Person-X wades into any discussion and suddenly we're off into the weeds. That's true whether you can draw a link or not. The issue of a link is irrelevant, at least as far as I can tell so far from the comments. (I'd argue that any _real_ story, as opposed to the made up ones I invented, would have some kind of link like this. Otherwise the game would just be too obvious)

The point being I flag things that generate lots of off-topic, emotionally-laden comment-noise. I might have gotten a little flag-happy with this article. Don't know. Been wrong lots of times before. Quite honestly I grow tired of seeing any famous person or brand name on HN. It's almost always an indication of time-wasting nonsense ahead.

> Quite honestly I grow tired of seeing any famous person or brand name on HN. It's almost always an indication of time-wasting nonsense ahead.

Quite honestly your standards seem wildly inconsistent: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4113928

Not that the standards of the rest of us are always consistent, but it's interesting to reflect on why linguist Chomsky on a tech/semantic subject might trigger one emotional reaction while Reagan advising on love triggers another....all here on a tech blog, eh?

The comment I made was about the value of historical people writing serial letters instead of just reading little one-of-a-kind snippets. But you are right. If I remember that set of comments correctly, it quickly wandered off into useless land as well.

If you'd like, happy to go back and flag it.

I'd like to view my responses as being consistent, but I know too much about how we all are screwed up to buy into my own bullshit. In my defense I believe my goal with that comment was to encourage people to read more history in long-form from the participants themselves. At least I think that's what I was doing. I know I went back and rewrote it a couple of times to make sure I wasn't wading into hero-worship, gossip, or partisan stuff.

I'm not that big of a Reagan fan. I'd view him in the top 1/3rd or so of presidents in the last century, but that's mostly because of his skills as a communicator and his ability to practice retail politics. Seems like the politicians that spend years doing some kind of face-to-face work like Reagan (working for GE and as governor) or Clinton (as governor) end up being at least more interesting as historical figures than the rest of them. Chomsky I have very little opinion about. He seems to like using his understanding of the philosophy of language to make political points. That's interesting to me as far as it goes. Hell, I'd love to talk philosophy of language, but I'm not sure that has anything to do with anything as far as what we're talking about. If anything, Chomsky to me seems one of those people who is still buying into his own bullshit -- but what do I know? As a famous person once said, a man has to know his limitations.

Damned internet. :)

What are you talking about? If all of a sudden there was a campaign to defame Vint Cerf through namecalling and slander, would that be "fluff" and "chitchat" for HN?

Chomsky is an qualified participant in this debate, unlike the examples you gave. He has published works on media analysis and the mechanisms by which facts are overpowered by propaganda. That is exactly the issue at stake here. Standing up for truth and rigorous investigation in the face of media pressure. That's why he is involved in this.. It's the kind of thing he's fought for his whole life.

Confusing.

"Pandering"? What possible definition of "pandering" are you using? This is an article about the origins of a technical communications medium, origins which apparently have some relation to semantics, commented on by the most eminent linguist I know of.

And since you're being all meta here and everything, and since you took the time to influence what's on the front page in this case, it's curious you apparently had no problem with yesterday's front page post which contained pertinent hacker news like...wait for it....the letter from divorced Ronald Reagan advising his son on marriage - a post you commented in and happened to take the time to include an Amazon affiliate link in.

...origins which apparently have some relation to semantics...

No, the origins have nothing to do with semantics. The debate over who invented "email" is dependent on the definition of the word "email". If you define email in certain ways, Van Vleck's 1961 system was the first email system. By Chomsky's definition, Van Vleck's 1961 invention doesn't qualify as email, but Ayyaduri's does.

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