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by sctb 3499 days ago
It's hard to read this in a way that doesn't suggest that real, serious diseases aren't, at which point it becomes hardly distinct from a troll comment. Please post civilly and substantively on HN; we have to ban accounts that refuse.
1 comments

> Please post civilly and substantively on HN

Did the author edit his comment? This is what I see:

> Go and Chess AI are SERIOUS and REAL problem. It is something which goes back for thousands years and will be remembered for another thousands years.

> AIDS and other contemporary diseases will be soon forgotten after their extinction.

That is both civil and makes a substantive point. There is nothing trolling about it. Nor does it suggest that AIDS is either fake or unserious: it suggests that someday AIDS will not be a problem (I think that's very likely, in the sense that bubonic plague is no longer a problem).

I can only imagine two possibilities: the author's original post was trolling, uncivil or unsubstantive; or sctb had a knee-jerk reaction.

Yeah. I think sctb is overreacting. thro32 just has a cynical view on what the public values, and has a long view of history.

The namespace collision between Go and Golang infuriated me before I realized that--- Go has lasted thousands of years, and could very well outlast Golang. :D

> Yeah. I think sctb is overreacting.

Probably 11 times out of 12 when I see that one of the admins has marked something as off-topic, I disagree. Probably a quarter of those times I _strenuously_ disagree; the rest I can kinda see their point, but still think it was on-topic. It's rare that I think, 'thanks admin team, that was garbage and deserved to be detached!'

From what I've seen, the admin team does more harm than good. I think that their hearts are in the right place, and I completely appreciate that they don't want HN to devolve into chaos — but I think that instead they risk turning HN into an echo chamber in which only views considered mainstream in San Francisco & Boston are permitted (even when those views are considered extreme elsewhere), while those which are considered mainstream elsewhere are silenced.