[Sephr]

Details I received from emailing mchannon:

> Thanks for reaching out. Mine uses a deliquescent salt, which requires no energy to absorb water from the air. It's pretty messy, but does the job. Getting the water back out is where the energy is required, and this is non-trivial, but still far better than those dehumidifier approaches, which are unfortunately the perpetual motion machines of our era.

[jessriedel]

Isnt the assumption here that he didn't want to share this publicly? It seems like a betrayl of trust, regardless of the merits.

[mchannon]

It’s a slightly different motivation. There is something worse than a forum troll, and that’s a forum censor.

I could post all the stuff publicly, but then I’d get more downvotes, because a lot of forum users enforce the norms they like.

I see the number of points in my posts like this one jockey up and down repeatedly, meaning equal double-digit numbers of readers approve and don’t. Being able to follow that history would prove fascinating, but it’s not a feature on HN.

I’ve even attracted a following of a couple of readers who downvote anything I post.

So it’s with the norm—enforcing downvoter in mind when I want to reach out.

Share away. I can’t even give my technology ideas away.

[Sephr]

I never told him that I would keep his correspondence private, nor did he ask me to do so.

Here is the entire email chain between myself and mchannon: https://go.eligrey.com/t/mchannon-email

[jessriedel]

That's why I said "assumption", i.e., from the context that he didn't post on HN but would respond to private messages.