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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Forget the abusive submission tactic and look at the article itself: far from being "important" for HN, it's entirely off-topic; less germane even than a common political article, this Salon piece is a shrill tour of seemingly every political position Salon endorses, tied together not with a coherent thesis but rather an overt suggestion that the world is ending.

You submit some great stuff, Ron, but I'd like to suggest as respectfully as I can that we'd all be better off if you took Salon off the list of sites you submitted from. It's not that there's never anything good on Salon (I got my favorite caesar salad recipe from Salon!), but the stuff you pull from it tends towards the (large) divisive, partisan, and unproductive portion of the Salon spectrum.

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> You submit some great stuff, Ron

Thanks!

> far from being "important" for HN, it's entirely off-topic

I think that's a matter of opinion. It is arguable from scientific evidence that the world as we have come to know it over the last few hundred years is in fact ending. (I'm not saying this is true, only that it's a rationally defensible position.) If I were under 30, I would consider that relevant.

> we'd all be better off if you took Salon off the list of sites you submitted from

I will take that recommendation under advisement.

On a different forum I think there'd be an interesting discussion to be had over whether the trend this story predicts is valid, and, if so, if it represents the "end of the world", or a transition from a highly anomalous period of human history and a sort of comment on how fragile such equilibria are and how much it's a product of the absurdly privileged lens through which we (and Salon) view humanity.

But this is Hacker News, so what we'd get instead is tinfoil hattery about fiat money and a 50-comment-long thread about Wal Mart where people would start calling each other names midway through.

Our politics are probably more similar than they are different, but where politics are concerned, HN doesn't reward accord; it rewards raucous discord. Which is a good reason to keep politics off HN.

Thanks for the extraordinarily reasonable response to my snippy comment.

I don't think this is a question of politics, this is a question of science, quite possibly the most important question of science for the predominant demographic on HN. The question of whether or not climate change will lead to the catastrophic effects that some are predicting is much more important than the question of, e.g. whether the Higgs boson exists. If climate change is real, and if the worst-case scenarios come to pass, those who are 20-30 today will feel most of the pain.

> Thanks for the extraordinarily reasonable response to my snippy comment.

No worries. Thanks for your informative posts on computer security. That matters too.

I agree with you, but you have to remember that even science is political, and in the US, climate change is _absolutely_ political. So you'll get knee-jerk partisan responses.

You're right. This is political, and I should have just come out and embraced that. But I would also point out that being political and being scientific are not mutually exclusive, and being political and being relevant to HN are not mutually exclusive either, and just because past political discussions on HN have degenerated into chaos doesn't necessarily mean that all future such discussions are necessarily doomed to suffer the same fate.

It's like I said in my OP: if climate change is real, then it's the 20-30-somthing crowd that hangs out here that will be the first to feel the real pain. One of the mottos around here is supposed to be: build something people want, and tackle hard problems. Well, something that will avert planetary disaster seems to me like it ought to be something that people want, and figuring out what that thing might be seems like a pretty hard problem.

Sure, but that's what upvoting is supposed to determine, not the headline renaming conventions.

No. That's a misconception as old as the site. Upvoting is one of the sorting mechanisms on HN, but if it was the only one, we'd all be looking at memes and cat pictures all day. From the jump, HN has used both voting and site guidelines that dictate what is & isn't on topic.

The headline renaming drama has been rehashed ad nauseam in the past few months. I submit that the healthiest way to view it is that nobody but the site's admins have a real appreciation for what a tedious chore it is to correct the often abusive breakage in submission titles, and so maybe it's a good idea to cut them a great deal more slack.

Concur entirely - http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/ I think is an excellent summary of what would (at least in my opinion) have likely already happened to HN otherwise.

And bang, in tptacek's comment we have everything that's wrong with Hacker News comments in a nutshell.

You just decried an article without once pointing out any errors in the article, then attempted to paint any number of submissions with the same brush. Nah, the article was just shrill and the only things the site is useful for is Caesar salad recipes.

Seriously, this kind of commenting is the reason Hacker News has become known as anything but a hangout for actual hackers - you know, the folks who use little things like reason and facts and logic in discussion.

>You just decried an article without once pointing out any errors in the article

Note that your criticism is based on the assertion that the only valid basis for rejecting a link on HN is factual error. But that is not true. There are lots of other reasons to reject a link, ranging from being off-topic to being incoherent. The simple truth is that this list is dynamic across users, dynamic in time for a single user, and will not be applied equally by all readers at all times.

And indeed, it is this dynamic, hopefully wise filter that gives HN a great deal of it's value. When that filter starts to fail in very serious ways, then it's time to start thinking about creating a new filter. (Personally, I think HN could very usefully have a kind of "alternative HN" off shoot who's focus was explicitly and exclusively technology-in-politics.)

I would argue your comment is a better example of that kind of commenting. tptacek gave us an opinion on the topic at hand. You commented solely to attack him and whine. Which one do you think does more damage to HN?

Like your comment whining and attacking him is an even better example of that kind of commenting, just like my comment here.

We could say that we just filled up useless space on this thread or we could simply call it a discussion, two individuals exchanging opinions.

I commented last! I win!

e: And don't even think of replying.

Too late. I thought of it.

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