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dang

42,819 karma · joined August 18, 2007

"Conflict is essential to human life, whether between different aspects of oneself, between oneself and the environment, between different individuals or between different groups. It follows that the aim of healthy living is not the direct elimination of conflict, which is possible only by forcible suppression of one or other of its antagonistic components, but the toleration of it—the capacity to bear the tensions of doubt and of unsatisfied need and the willingness to hold judgement in suspense until finer and finer solutions can be discovered which integrate more and more the claims of both sides. It is the psychologist's job to make possible the acceptance of such an idea so that the richness of the varieties of experience, whether within the unit of the single personality or in the wider unit of the group, can come to expression."

Marion Milner, 'The Toleration of Conflict', Occupational Psychology, 17, 1, January 1943

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Please send HN questions to hn@ycombinator.com.

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dang··on Biology might not be quantum, but its math is quantumlike
Thanks! that is a far better comment and a nice example of the rebound effect :)

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

dang··on Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps (2025)
Discussed at the time:

Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44237881 - June 2025 (114 comments)

dang··on Does Georgism work? Five years later
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

You've been here a long time, and it's dismaying to see a longstanding user degrade the site like this.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

(I suppose I'd better add that this has nothing to do Georgism. You're welcome to make substantive points thoughtfully, but this was not that.)

dang··on Does Georgism work? Five years later
Can you please make your substantive points without snark or resorting to the flamewar style? We're hoping to avoid those things here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

dang··on ASML says it sold 'absolutely nothing' in Europe in 2026
(we eventually merged them hither)
dang··on Japan moves to tighten rules for foreigners
Please don't cross into personal attack either.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

dang··on Japan moves to tighten rules for foreigners
Please don't cross into personal attack.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

dang··on Show HN: Spivak's Calculus formalized in Lean 4 – every theorem, every problem
Can you please not post AI-generated or AI-edited comments to HN? It's not allowed here - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079.

Of course, it's impossible to know for sure what was LLM processed or not, but this post got classified that way, which is why it was flagged.

dang··on Evolving programming languages in the AI era
Thanks! It's always best to submit the original source (this is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

I've merged the other comment that was here into https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49839567.

dang··on How one Twitch chat message became code execution on a streamer’s PC
Url changed from https://cyberinsider.com/malicious-twitch-chat-messages-can-..., which points to this.
dang··on An agent used DNS to reach an external chatbot
That seems like the sort of thing that would have had a lot of HN attention over the years, but I guess not:

Ping Tunnel – Send TCP Traffic over ICMP (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21009598 - Sept 2019 (1 comment)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512416 (March 2009)

Ping Tunnel - Send TCP traffic over ICMP - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=90196 - Dec 2007 (1 comment)

dang··on An OpenAI agent used DNS to reach an external chatbot
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49853137, which was posted a bit earlier.
dang··on CAPTCHAs don't prove you're human – they prove you're American (2017)
Related:

CAPTCHAs don’t prove you’re human – they prove you’re American (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35788139 - May 2023 (2 comments)

CAPTCHAs don’t prove you’re human – they prove you’re American (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25226805 - Nov 2020 (679 comments)

CAPTCHAs don’t prove you’re human – they prove you’re American - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15785878 - Nov 2017 (20 comments)

dang··on ASML currently sells no chipmaking machines in Europe, executive says
Comments moved thither. Thanks!
dang··on ASML Executive Says It Has No Sales in Europe
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49844663.
dang··on Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell
You packed a lot of things in here! Let me try to tease them apart.

> But me pointing out all the infrastructure this will likely break, and how, is not?

Of course it's fine. It's just a question of how. There were two problems with your comment: (1) it was snarky, which we're trying to avoid and which HN's guidelines ask you not do do; and (2) you didn't provide much information, so it came across as shallow. The combination of snarky and shallow is bad for the conversation we're hoping for.

It sounds like you have experience in this domain. If so, you could write an interesting comment about your experience (e.g. with spreadsheets, VBA, how they control businesses) and how the current release will break things. If you did that by adding details from your personal experience (anecdotes are king!) and avoiding snark, that would be more than fine.

Such comments, of course, take time to write. If you don't want to or don't have time, that's ok—just please refrain from snarky/shallow/indignant one-liners.

> A quote from the Baghavad Gita on this being a bad thing, is fine

It's common (and understandable) that when people see comment A going unmoderated while their own comment B is scolded by a mod, they feel singled out for unfair treatment. I've described this in the past as "it always feels like the mods are against you" (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).

But there's a dirt-simple explanation: we don't see everything. Not even close! There's far too much for us to see even 10% of what gets posted here. When you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest reason is that we didn't see it. You can always help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.

> Because fine, if that's what keeps getting your attention (this isn't the first time)

What gets my attention are comments breaking the site guidelines. It's nothing personal! I didn't remember replying to you before, though once you mentioned it, I looked it up.

It goes against every bone in my Aquarian body to regard myself as a policeman, but the analogy somewhat holds in this case. Say you get pulled over for speeding. It's easy to feel you're being singled out: what about the cars that were speeding past you? do they just get a pass? But it's not personal. Policeperson is just sitting there doing their (no doubt rather boring) highway duty.

> I'll try to Americanise the way I talk here

I gather that you perceive HN's guidelines as specifically American? I see them differently. They are an attempt at figuring out how to manage a large internet forum across national differences—and other differences—without degenerating into mutual clubbing (the caveman kind, not the dancing kind).

None of the HN moderators is American. The site was created by an American, but he was born in England and has been ensconced there for quite a while now. It's all more complex than one's assumptions imagine, and when you fire those at people, you can sting them. Even at internet distances.

dang··on Show HN: A game about fake news and memes
(Toptext copied from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49825108.)

You probably shouldn't have posted this 14 times - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please don't use HN primarily for promotion" and https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html: "a small number of reposts is ok" (14 is not a small number!) But let's not let that get in the way of a good submission.

dang··on Show HN: VNetMap – A zero-knowledge E2E encrypted network topology mapper
Can you make it so https://app.vnetmap.com doesn't require a login? Or, failing that, share a video showing it in action?
dang··on Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell
Quite! And fortunately I don't know what the opinion is.

It turns out that, with practice, you can read comments along one axis and not another. And boy do we practice.

dang··on OpenAI Codex 401 Outage
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49851032, which was posted a bit earlier.
dang··on Issues with Codex – Identified – Full Outage
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49851032, which was posted a bit earlier.
dang··on Show HN: Tui2web – use any TUI on the web
Can you please not post AI-generated or AI-edited comments to HN? It's not allowed here - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079.

Of course, it's impossible to know for sure what was LLM processed or not, but some of your posts (like this one) have been getting classified that way.

dang··on Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell
"Don't be snarky."

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

dang··on Show HN: Jev Plays Pokémon Red
Dare we have two Pokemon-playing-AI threads at the same time?

Teaching a World Model to Play Pokemon - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49849907

dang··on Teaching a World Model to Play Pokemon
Dare we have two AI-plays-Pokemon threads at the same time?

Show HN: Jev Plays Pokémon Red - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49845172

dang··on Tell HN: Codex Is Down [fixed]
Thanks - I put that in the toptext too.
dang··on Tell HN: Codex Is Down [fixed]
Or switching to Claude
dang··on Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell
Is https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/microsoft365insider... better? We could swap the URLs.

Edit: I swapped the URLs.

dang··on Plan mode is dead
Can you please not post AI-generated or AI-edited comments to HN? It's not allowed here - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079.

Of course, it's impossible to know for sure what was LLM processed or not, but some of your posts (like this one) have been getting classified that way.

dang··on Mdash as a Service
Yes, sorry - sctb wrote that bit of code years ago when people were using weird URLs to do bad things, as opposed to good things like this.

I've changed the URL to https://mdash.tsak.dev from https://xn--rtj.tsak.dev/ now.

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