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0 pointsnecovek3y ago0 comments

My apologies for assuming it's a he: not sure exactly what of the rules do you think I broke, as I don't think I was snarky (sounds closest).

I was mostly making fun of the language we humans tend to use sometimes: a car expert would be applying their expertise on cars, a botany expert would do it in botany, but it's not an "honesty expert" but a "dishonesty expert"?

I do believe that's an interesting point to make, even if — obviously — at least someone has misread the joke as something else.

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dredmorbius3y ago· 2 in thread

HN members are generally presumed to be familiar with standard tools for subverting paywalls (see also HN Guidelines). Or simply reading the comments thread to find such a workaround. In this case the paywall link is now at the top of the comments thread, though it was posted a few minutes after your own comment.

Commenting that you didn't read the article, then making a series of shallow and incorrect assumptions about the circumstances ... seems on the nose for shallow, dismissive snark.

Further, it violates HN's prime directive: "What Hacker News is: a place for stories that gratify intellectual curiosity and civil, substantive comments." <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404>.

I'm not a mod, but thought I'd address why your comment might be engendering the response it has.

necovekOP3y ago

Part of the guidelines is also to assume best intent: my point was not about paywall (which was admittedly a bad and superfluous excuse, yet I care not to expend time on it further).

My intent was to highlight an inconsistency in naming a skill with a negative connotation (dishonesty). How can I more explicitly direct the conversation to why is this skill a "dishonesty expertise" (or rather, an "expert on (ethics and) dishonesty")?

I still believe my actual point is "intellectually curious". What other skills are there that are like this? Is there a bad-at-sewing expert who's actually good at sewing?

dredmorbius3y ago

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

Four replies deep into this thread, are we discussing topics of intellectual curiosity ... or ... something else?

That itself is a strong indicator of the issue here.

I strongly recommend pg's discussion of comments, particularly about their relationship to kudzu:

<http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html>

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