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dwnw01/22/20251 replyview on HN

Not guilty. No sarcasm intended, of course. If your guidelines are so broad to include this, you should work on them, and in turn, yourself.

Governor says our power grid is the best in the universe. Why don't you believe us?

Stop breaking your own rules.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

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

Let's not ruin HN with overmoderation. This kind of thing is no longer in fashion, right?


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dang01/22/2025

If you didn't intend your comment to be a snarky one-liner, that didn't come across to me, and I'm pretty sure that would also be the case for many others.

Intent is a funny thing—people usually assume that good intent is sufficient because it's obvious to themselves, but the rest of us don't have access to that state, so has to be encoded somehow in your actual comment in order to get communicated. I sometimes put it this way: the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I take your point at least halfway though, because it wasn't the worst violation of the guidelines. (Usually I say "this is not a borderline case" but this time it was!) I'm sensitive to regional flamewar because it's tedious and, unlike national flamewar or religious flamewar, it tends to sneak up on people (i.e. we don't realize we're doing it).

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