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Comment by mikeroher | Hacker News Reader

RIP Aaron.

It's interesting how technology leads to immortality, no?

He's dead, yet we still read his words, listen to his thoughts, think of him as a person.

The written word leads to immortality. Although one could argue that writing and preserving writings are products of technology, I think you mean internet and such 21st century stuff, not the printing press or ink.

I don't mean to find fault - only replied because it never ceases to amaze me that people can talk to me across centuries.

The written word is immortal, but websites are not. Eventually your domain name and hosting will expire, your server will die. Presumably someone is keeping Aaron's site alive, but by default, things you write on your own website will go away when you're gone.

Maybe someone should do a kickstarter for large buildings where printed websites can be stored for posterity.

The Internet Archive[0] is an organization that is working to preserve websites and online content, albeit not in printed form. In fact, they have an archive of Aaron's website[1] and a collection of other digital artifacts from his life[2].

[0]: http://archive.org/

[1]: http://wayback.archive-it.org/3492/20130113003702/http://www...

[2]: http://archive.org/details/aaronsw

What's the difference between Descartes' mediations and Aaron's writings? Ignoring the obvious, technology simply made them easier to read. They're avail. on his public website whereas Descartes' mediations are more commonly found in textbooks and reproductions of his originals.

Descartes probably isn't the best example because with one quick Google search, I found this: http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/descartes/medit... Still, the principle remains true.

I don't know what kind of person would downvote this comment.

No one has yet..

I mostly a lurker of hacker news, do the see the scores as you gain more profile karama?

No.

What?

http://i.imgur.com/S0e14ml.png

You see your own points, not others'.

Pretty sure that was the question being asked. He wanted to know if/how mikeroher knew he hadn't been downvoted.

Since only I can see it, at the moment, the comment has 7 points.

Possibly they had. Possibly went gray for a time, indicating that its score was non-positive. Then it got upvoted, bringing it back to being positive.

It's a vapid comment that lowers signal:noise, of course it should be downvoted.

Such comments are explicitly encouraged—see http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html:

Empty comments can be ok if they're positive. There's nothing wrong with submitting a comment saying just "Thanks." What we especially discourage are comments that are empty and negative—comments that are mere name-calling.

"Are ok" is not the same as "are explicitly encouraged". They are tolerated would be more correct. Also we cannot mindlessly follow a static HTML document.

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