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Comment by SamReidHughes | Hacker News Reader

When 'tptacek is wrong, he's obnoxiously wrong, especially in his inability to believe in government misbehavior, and his willingness to denigrate "message board nerds" on that sort of matter. (See also his attacks on Greenwald when the Snowden story started.) So personally I was looking forward to seeing somebody comment about him.

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Pretty much. Not only that, but he's incredibly influential, so to see him get knocked down a peg does a lot of good.

This is a bit much and was not at all the motivation behind my comment.

This is what happens when you make it personal, though. I try to let being right be its own reward, not a license to tell people how wrong they were.

tptacek has the most karma on HN (even moreso than pg): https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders (for reference, pg has 149712 karma at the time of writing; tptacek has 165020 and the next person has 88887) His opinion is respected by many (and many accept what he says without question). A retraction by tptacek reminds us all to think critically

lawnchair_larry's comment is equivalent to questioning the president or a major celebrity, which oftentimes isn't a personal grudge.

What I do is just not read the usernames (beyond roughly scanning the word to figure out who replied to who). No really, I mean that, I don't even know your username.

That makes for a wonderful experience really. I interact with this nameless entity and each post is largely valued by its responses (I often leave an article open for a few hours to let the comments ripen a bit, that also adds a lot).

I think HN might be designed to encourage this, judging from the lighter color given to the post metadata line.

Comparing someone with high comment karma to the president is a bit absurd, no? The president could more aptly be compared to forum moderators on any given discussion website, as both have some executive power.

Yeah, I get that a lot too. Also his attitude towards open source cryptography related projects is strange and totally unjustified imho.

He's had a perfectly friendly attitude towards GPG, and in the case of others you can see ample evidence that his skepticism is justified. Maybe if the open source cryptography projects you're referring to weren't bad projects then the attitude would be strange.

cryptocat sucks, plain and simple.

> When 'tptacek is wrong, he's obnoxiously wrong, especially in his inability to believe in government misbehavior

For the record, this is incorrect. In past interactions he has stated his concerns over certain of NSA's "misbehavior".

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