Maybe before we spend a lot of time complaining about how federal prosecutors are unsympathetic assholes, we should start by examining our own community.
Why? I'd guess because the blog post refers to celebrity hackers bullying another hacker. The community -- more than just these few guys -- can't even behave civilly. It's a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
Contending the latter should be addressed before (or even comparatively) to the former is what I take issue with.
Because he is suggesting that "someone said someone else's code was bad" is a more pressing and concerning issue than "the federal government threatened to destroy the life of a young man and drove him to suicide over a trivial non-offense".
>Are you sincerely arguing "It's OK for me to be an unsympathetic asshole because I don't send people to jail"?
I can't imagine how one could make an honest, good faith attempt at communications and come to that conclusion. It seems more like you are deliberately looking for a strawman. I am arguing that pg can in fact make a fallacious and ignorant statement, even if he is aware of the difference between two cases he is comparing.
As someone once said to me: I can't imagine how someone could make an honest, good-faith attempt at communications and come to that conclusion.
What pg said, albeit more politely, is that calling out federal prosecutors for lacking sympathy when you don't exhibit any yourself is rank hypocrisy.
Stop trying to pretend he said something other than what he really said. His words speak for themselves, you don't get to invent an absurd justification to pretend they mean something else. You can read the post yourself, it is still there.
He has no way to know if the people calling out the federal prosecutors have sympathy or not. There is no hypocrisy in Bob saying the prosecutors did something wrong while Joe (who Bob has never met or heard of) is saying Sally wrote some bad code.
And destroy their reputation. And, in some cases, push them to the edge.
This idea that we shouldn't try to address problems in the HN community because there are problems elsewhere in the world is ridiculous.
"Maybe before..."
"before" merely implies order. It does not mean "instead of". It means, "this first, then that."
"...federal prosecutors are unsympathetic assholes..."
The subject here is not jail sentences or felony convictions or legal antics. The subject here is sympathy. For example, a statement made on HN which would fit pg's subject is, "federal prosecutors had no sympathy for...".
"...we should start by examining our own community."
The implication here is that our own community is also often unsympathetic and full of assholish behavior.
pg was not comparing public ridicule and hurt feelings to death, prison, or felony convictions. He was only suggesting that one of the complaints here over Aaron's case has been that the prosecutors were "unsympathetic", even though our own community is also unsympathetic.
I have no idea how you could have misinterpreted a single statement of 24 words that badly.
The comment was a bit of a troll and not insightful so I trolled back. If this were not pg's website, I am certain you wouldn't be defending the statement because it lacks substance.
On the contrary, the former is something we probably won't change [1], while the latter is almost certainly something we can change.
> The comment was a bit of a troll and not insightful so I trolled back. If this were not pg's website, I am certain you wouldn't be defending the statement because it lacks substance.
I seriously doubt he was trolling, and you shouldn't be so certain. This being pg's site is completely irrelevant in this case [2]; I'm simply ... actually, disgusted is about the best adjective I can think of to describe how I feel about the nonsense arguments on HN lately. People seem to be in some kind of a hurry to disagree, because they aren't actually reading and comprehending what other people are writing, they aren't stopping for a moment to consider that perhaps the person they're responding to isn't an idiot or a troll, they aren't maintaining basic principles of civility, they're commenting on (and arguing about!) subjects that are way outside their expertise, and they seem to be nearly drooling at the chance to engage in a witch hunt.
For example, nothing in my reply was a defense of pg's statement. Nothing. Not a single word. The entirety of my reply was a tutorial on high school level reading comprehension and a snide remark about HN (well, and a question about you). So, how is it that you interpreted that as a defense of his statement?
--
[1]: I may yet be pleasantly surprised. I certainly wouldn't've guessed at how much press the Aaron Swartz case would end up getting, and there is some small chance now that it might end up causing some kind of change somewhere. That would be great. As of yet though, it has changed absolutely nothing.
[2]: Assuming of course that you don't find it significant that the founder of one of the programming communities on the internet is indicting the community's behavior -- although it's not clear if he's referring to the HN community or the broader programming or technical community.
Maybe before you spend a lot of time complaining about how other people comment, you should start by focusing on making a positive contribution yourself.
It's a lot easier to be an asshole to people in certain structured formats -- prosecution, online chat (IRC being the ideal, but even email, twitter, and blogs lead to aggression). It's harder in person, or in other formats (essays?).