Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nursie | Hacker News Reader

>> If you talked to your spouse like that it would be called abuse.

And if you hit your spouse like boxers do in the ring then that would be abuse too. It's almost as if there are different rules for different situations.

(No, I'm not saying that kernel development is like boxing)

View on HN

The difference is consent.

Now, of course, that sparks off a question about whether submitting your post or your startup to HN is de facto consenting to be verbally abused. But I think that's a pretty useful conversation to have.

Whenever you put your own work in the world, then expect criticism. It doesn't mean verbal abuse should be the norm - it just means that criticism is most likely gonna' happen. HN isn't the only online community - and it's most likely not your target market for a startup. So pushing a product that's not intended for HN users as a target demographic, and bleeding over every critique here is the wrong move. If anything, you'll understand your tech stack and scalability concerns by doing a Show HN here. It shouldn't be your go-to source for pushing your startup.

I like to think of HN as one big subset of focus group users. Get another subset of people with a similar psychographic/demographic trait and you're likely to face just as much criticism, just of a different bent than you would receive here.

Generally, I agree with everything you say here. If you're asking for feedback, then you will get feedback, and some of it will be critical.

I think you'd agree that feedback does not equal verbal abuse. So, to go back to the original question, do you feel that by asking for feedback you're consenting to be verbally abused, or do you feel that's not the case?

I think verbal abuse is a subjective x on the number line of criticism and said feedback. Some people can handle getting called shit, and some people think it's the end of the world. To answer your question, no I don't think when putting something out in the world you're consenting to verbal abuse. I think you're consenting to unmitigated feedback (if it's an online forum, perhaps), and sometimes that feedback will come in the form of verbal abuse - whether that's someone's right or not to give said feedback, I can't say.

I would say no. I'd say especially no if someone else submits it!

I can't load up the article again (squid error) but IIRC the guy was posted to HN by someone else,d then received a bunch of abuse on his site and via email etc. Perhaps better to keep the verbal abuse here rather than there?

When I first started using HN, only a little over a year ago really, it did seem different to now. A lot less criticism (yay, no mudslinging or fanboi fights!) and a lot more bootstrappy startup speak (though that can get just as annoying).

Oh well.

The Internet is not yours. If you put content on the PUBLIC Internet, consider yourself to be consenting to any abuse the Internet as a whole wishes to dish out in return.

So if I see you walking down a PUBLIC street and you are talking loudly, it's acceptable for me to smack you round the head with a baseball bat for being too loud? Or do we expect people in a civilised society to have some higher standards of behaviour?

Bad analogy - you are escalating the situation from talk to violence. It's nothing like talking on the web about how others talk on the web. Your analogy would better suit "I didn't like what he said, so I DDoS'd the server" - escalating whats going on.

Really?

So if a person decides to post a picture of themselves on their blog, they're consenting to having that picture photomanipulated onto hardcore pornography then emailed to their family and co-workers, for example?

Exactly.

Otherwise, include a license with your work, state that it is copyrighted, and still expect people to say whatever they want about you or it... Or, put it on your own private network, known as Not-The-Internet.

The 1886 Berne Convention first established recognition of copyrights among sovereign nations, rather than merely bilaterally. Under the Berne Convention, copyrights for creative works do not have to be asserted or declared, as they are automatically in force at creation: an author need not "register" or "apply for" a copyright in countries adhering to the Berne Convention.[10] As soon as a work is "fixed", that is, written or recorded on some physical medium, its author is automatically entitled to all copyrights in the work, and to any derivative works unless and until the author explicitly disclaims them, or until the copyright expires.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright

Honest question -- is it conceivable that the work is never "fixed" on some physical medium? Years ago, I thought "internet law" was a silly concept -- but as in the case above, the letter of the law might not be enough to support the spirit of the law.

Hard drives are a physical medium.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fixed_in_a_tangible_medium_of...

But is memcached on RAM?

I'm not super familiar with memcached, but either memcached on RAM "is sufficiently permanent or stable to permit it to be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated for a period of more than transitory duration", or memcached is talking to a persistent database (i.e., HDD) in the background. Because I can read posts on that blog that are over a year old.

The recent Blizzard case found that making a copy of something into RAM created a fixed copy of it, I believe.

Remember, intellectual property rights are all thought-crime laws. They don't have to make sense.

So, either have a laugh about it, or you don't put personally-identifying info up on the 'net.

Shocking, I know, that maybe oversharing is a bad idea without some permissions mechanisms in place.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com