Comment by alialkhatib | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alialkhatib | Hacker News Reader

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Those clauses seem contradictory. You have a very clear (and in my opinion on point) critique of what you're presenting us, but you don't have the inclination to write a blog post? You even wrote your own top-level comment providing some context. That would have made a sufficient blog post right there.

(A great blog post might have compared bad vs good cases, or provided some suggestions on improving, or even looked more broadly at whether this was an outlier of badly structured/provided data or just the norm)

The whole "Try (downloading|accessing) this..." strikes me as the same kind of title as Upworthy's "You'll never believe this..." in that it seems vaguely like link-baiting. I'm a little too curious not to click just to see what the dataset is about.

> You have a very clear (and in my opinion on point) critique of what you're presenting us, but you don't have the inclination to write a blog post?

Correct. I don't have a blog, and don't care to set one up. And I'd imagine a .gov link would have a lower chance of being linkbait.

There are mediums (pun not intended) where you can make the equivalent of a blog post without much effort (Medium, Quora, I'm sure there are others). And link-bait is more about the marketing used to get people to click on the link (e.g. editorializing), isn't it?

I don't want to get into semantics, so let's consider this a minor detail, because the more important matter is that you're editorializing. HN has a pretty clear (and helpful) set of guidelines on posting: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>If you want to add initial commentary on the link, write a blog post about it and submit that instead.

I'm not trying to harangue you or anything; you make a good point but it's hamstrung by a length-limited title section.

I really appreciate your efforts in explaining the posting guidelines, here! It's about respecting the forum; this is _not_ some one individual's personal editorial-logspace, but instead a place to share and discuss full-bodied web content.

Now, to defend this poster -- it's a quick point that speaks volumes.

"A link is worth a thousand bytes," sometimes.

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