Hacker News Reader

> always

Can you be more specific here? In an article about civilization 5300 years ago, where India has had a human population for at least 65,000 years, saying "always" is fairly vague

View on HN

Sorry I was referring to mechanical techniques of spinning a drill in general, that I'm familiar with, in addition to the bow method described. I was not referring to any time scale.

I want to be as polite as possible, but explain the confusion that timerol was experiencing, just in case it was unclear. Because the article's focus is about the oldest "sophisticated drilling tool", and your comment said "Indian carpenters always had ...", the implication is that you're disagreeing with the article being discussed. The information you share is interesting, but it's slightly off topic from the main point of discussion (ie, the age of sophisticated tooling). You can avoid confusion like this by explicitly acknowledging when you're going to go off-topic. Eg, you could say "Not related to the age of the tool, but I saw similar tools used in India -- Indian carpenters always had..." I hope that explanation is polite and maybe helpful :). Apologies if I over-explained.

Somewhat relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle

Reply on news.ycombinator.com