Ask HN: How Should We Treat Each Other Here?

Yesterday there was a absurd post about a guy who would rather be in jail than in college. Instead of flagging it, I thought I'd turn lemons into lemonade by posting a smarta$$ comment, as many of us often do.

Humor is a strange animal on-line, especially in the hacker world. What would obviously be a joke in person can easily be interpreted differently in writing. I have often resorted to using <sarcasm> and </sarcasm> tags, but sometimes forget. Also, hacker humor has an even higher standard. There's a fine line here; too subtle: nobody "gets" it, too obvious: take it to reddit where it belongs. But humor does have its place here. Some of my favorite comments have made me ruin keyboards when I read them while drinking.

I often joke that I feel like I'm in jail working in a cubible in someone else's office instead of my own company, a common theme here. So my response to the "accounting vs. jail" post was 3 words: "What's the difference?" Interesting things happened. In the first half hour, it got 6 up-votes. I imagined fellow hackers in the same situation getting a chuckle. Then I got this response from kyro:

"Your childish, baseless, and condescending comment is actually quite offensive. You'd think someone as old as yourself would know that there's more to life than a job. And you'd think these types of garbage comments wouldn't get upvoted. To be honest, it's not even that witty."

Ouch.

I have a personal rule to not respond to something like that for 24 hours. So I just said something like, "Lighten up," and forgot about it.

24 hours later, I haven't forgetten. kyro, would you have said that to me in person? If not, then please don't say it here. I have bumped into about 25 fellow hn'ers at various events, and couldn't wait to meet them in person. Now I wonder what I'd say if I bumped into kyro (whoever that is) at an event.

I once made the mistake of referring to someone on-line (OP, not a poster here) as a pussy. Big mistake. I still think he was a pussy (he talked about how he needed drugs to make it through school), but I never should had said it. You guys straighened me out in a hurry.

I would suggest everyone remember the site guidelines, which are basically the same as in any kindergarten. Don't say something you wouldn't say in person. If you downvote, add a comment (why?) And most of all, treat others how you would like to be treated. With so much talk about, bits, bytes, and dollars, it's easy to forget that it's always people first.

Oh, and if you have a smarta$$ remark, go for it, but make it clever. After another 300 lines of code, I could use the respite.