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Comment by angersock | Hacker News Reader

What? That's quite silly.

On the internet/TV for example, you are failing to take into account the spread of tech and efficiency. We can have factories produce TVs automatically, and internet infrastructure doesn't require a huge number of people to keep it running--and most of them, I wager, would be happy to keep doing what they're doing, because it's fun.

As for fancy restaurants or organic groceries...that's just a function of cooking something well and having something to cook. If you're not working all the time, you are more likely to be able to help in your community garden.

I'm sorry, but your assertion isn't borne out by thought.

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What? That's quite silly. [...] I'm sorry, but your assertion isn't borne out by thought.

This comment would have been better without its hostile preface and its hostile appendix. Please don't use such language on Hacker News.

All: Please re-read what you've posted and, if it contains phrases that contribute hostility to the discussion, edit them out.

This is really important, because (speaking metaphorically) our brains are all programmed to pick up on the agitation in such language. That leads to bad things, like the comment getting less reflective attention, and threads getting provoked into a downward spiral.

This is meant in all seriousness (and posted here instead of private mail because it is something that others could probably benefit from reading):

The preface is the gist of my post ("I disagree with your reasoning, and find it absurd."), and the appendix summarizes the conclusion ("The conclusion you've come to does not follow logically once you take into account other factors").

I agree (having written some bad posts in my time) that writing "You're a fucking idiot, how the hell did you come up with this?" is not good discourse.

At the same time, avoiding any flavor or diction in our writing here would make it tedious to read and worse still boring to write.

There's got to be some middle-ground; I assure you that it wasn't written to be hostile (consider the corrective reply and my acknowledgement elsewhere in this subthread).

EDIT: Also, where do you come down on the "meta discussion kills" theory of communities?

I am confident that the creative and intelligent users of Hacker News can figure out how to retain "flavor and diction" while making their writing more substantive and less rude.

Meta discussion is bad on HN. My current stream of meta comments is a special case, and temporary. Sometimes one prescribes medicine that is toxic because the disease is worse. Hacker News' disease is unsubstantive and hostile language in comments. We're pushing hard against this problem from several angles. Providing clear feedback to the community is one.

I don't want to jinx it by commenting on how well it's going so far, but I would definitely like to invite any of you who notice a change, for better or worse, to tell us about it at hn@ycombinator.com. We'll read it with interest.

(Edited for less risk of jinxing.)

Internet infrastructure actually does require a somewhat large number of people and it is quite fragile.

I never would have though a fiber cut (which seems to happen almost weekly) would have such a large impact, but it does. I figured BGP would reroute around that and to some extent it does, but there's still a lot of manual route handling.

I think you misinterpreted my comment as if it were about what "we" as a society could do, but I meant it as a comment about what any of us as an individual could do.

Ah, thank you for the clarification.

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