When I see a post about education, I expect tokenadult to have a well sourced and reasonable comment on the topic. When I see a post about security, I expect some intelligent and experienced discourse from you, cperciva, or dfranke. patio11 is consistently arguing from experience about things he knows, like uISV, Rails, and A/B testing, with real-world examples to back it up. These are really valuable posts.

Something like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=924045 isn't entirely valuable, but it's not a bad thing.

However, something like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=876726 misses the point entirely and becomes harmful in its Ludditism. To go straw: Do we really need a "product" like plumbing to replace our evolved mutually beneficial practice of shitting wherever we happen to be? Do we really need any of this so-called "medicine" to "hack" nature without consequences?

It's a shy step from vaccine frenzy and represents a titanic reputational blow that- in the absence of proven, public results or credentials- limits the ability to take people seriously. When the quack-science spouting is utterly indistinguishable from what might actually be an experienced person talking from an educated viewpoint, the whole signal is poisoned. No one ever wants to ask the random oracle more than one question.