>Please don't copy and paste content into Hacker News, regardless of how good you think your past comments were. The threads here are for conversation, not reciting from the record.
Would you mind giving some guidance on what I should have done in the situation? I was doing the best I could against the constraints. The situation was that someone made point X, to which I have point Y as a reply. Both X and Y, in some form, have been posted numerous times.
Should I:
1) Not reply?
2) Reply, but make sure to reword Y each time?
3) Link to a previous version of Y?
4) Copy-paste a previous Y but not admit to it so it's not clear I did anything wrong?
I chose 5) copy-paste the best previous version of Y and be transparent that I"m doing so, and why I thought the circumstances merited it. You think that's the wrong choice. 4) and 3) don't seem much better based on what you've said.
I'm guessing you want 2), but IMO that's even worse because it disconnects the discussion from previous ones and forces us to retread the same ground more clumsily.
>There is no "HN mentality", just a large statistical cloud that people see what what they want in. Most of that cloud has been the opposite of what you're suggesting. Commenters here have been not just skeptical but cynical and outraged by Theranos for years,
That's kind of my point. The typical comment is outraged at Theranos. But the typical comment is also endorsing the very kind of behavior that avoids and ignores those very same warning signs. "Well sure, I consistently said over the years to 'never listen to the haters'. But I didn't mean when they were right, of course!"
"HN [most often] tells everyone that no one knows what they're doing either" is not revisionism. Revisionism would be claiming outrage that someone would press ahead when they didn't know what they were doing.
Writing a new comment would be fine! and linking to an old one would also be fine. I agree that what you did is better than #4 (and am grateful for that) but it's still not kosher. Think of how good conversation works. People can make the same points in different contexts without literally repeating past statements. Something about creating each statement in the moment—even though there are only so many ideas to go around—serves conversational flow.
I don't agree with you at all about what the typical HN commenter is endorsing; it seems to me you're adding a lot of interpretation to a lot of disparate information and constructing something of a straw man.
By the way, if anyone is interested, only a small minority (10% if that) of HN users are in Silicon Valley. And plenty of those identify more against it than with it.
Would you mind giving some guidance on what I should have done in the situation? I was doing the best I could against the constraints. The situation was that someone made point X, to which I have point Y as a reply. Both X and Y, in some form, have been posted numerous times.
Should I:
1) Not reply?
2) Reply, but make sure to reword Y each time?
3) Link to a previous version of Y?
4) Copy-paste a previous Y but not admit to it so it's not clear I did anything wrong?
I chose 5) copy-paste the best previous version of Y and be transparent that I"m doing so, and why I thought the circumstances merited it. You think that's the wrong choice. 4) and 3) don't seem much better based on what you've said.
I'm guessing you want 2), but IMO that's even worse because it disconnects the discussion from previous ones and forces us to retread the same ground more clumsily.
>There is no "HN mentality", just a large statistical cloud that people see what what they want in. Most of that cloud has been the opposite of what you're suggesting. Commenters here have been not just skeptical but cynical and outraged by Theranos for years,
That's kind of my point. The typical comment is outraged at Theranos. But the typical comment is also endorsing the very kind of behavior that avoids and ignores those very same warning signs. "Well sure, I consistently said over the years to 'never listen to the haters'. But I didn't mean when they were right, of course!"
"HN [most often] tells everyone that no one knows what they're doing either" is not revisionism. Revisionism would be claiming outrage that someone would press ahead when they didn't know what they were doing.