This is unnecessarily rude. Implying that a person needs a pacifier like an infant is snarky.

> please don’t sneer

As the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) say.

It was a counterpoint to his sneer, I felt like it was a productive re-contextualization of their narrow viewpoint. I am really surprised people seem to be missing the parent comments snark but not mine, it was really on the nose.

I was sincerely not trying to be snarky. I'm sorry you took it that way. I am actually GenX, so I know all too well what it was like back in the days of paper maps and pay phones. I couldn't imagine going back as they seem barbaric now.

Ah, my sincerest apologies. I guess it was hard for me to see it through any other lens, I was very much expecting a technophile versus traditionalist discourse to break out in this thread and so I was primed to read your words just one way. I even re-read your comment after others were discussing mine to make sure I wasn't being an idiot and was still certain. I suppose I was being an idiot!

Sorry again, I shouldn't have been snarky in either case, I was just so darn ready to have that discussion.

Thanks for the apology ehnto. My OP should have been more clear in its intent.

If you see someone sneering, then request them not to sneer. Link them to the HN guidelines. Counter-sneering ruins the discussion.

If you're not dang, isn't linking to the guidelines against the guidelines?

Does it say so in the guidelines?

why would it be?

because it serves no real purpose except to make the person doing the referencing feel a bit smug

You drive in complete silence? Or were you just singling out only specific forms of technology with which to mock a stranger?

They were mocking someone for choosing to do without technology, it was just a snippy retort. Why aren't you jumping down their throat?

edit: Turns out I was wrong about the parent's intent. For what it's worth, I do actually drive in silence a lot. There is something about a vehicle in transit that temporarily relieves you of responsibilities outside of the drive, and it's a great time to reflect. I could reflect on this comment thread, for example. Two times in the past few months I've been wrong about someone's intent on HN and met them with a little too much spice than was fair, that's worth reflecting on.

I sometimes drive in complete silence. The friction between the tires and the asphalt is close to white noise. It contains a range of high and low frequencies that you can't easily filter out, something that I tried to deal with at a computer vision class project involving self-driving tech. Also it can be amazingly therapeutic.

I drive in silence. I don't understand why some people feel the need to _always_ be listening to something.

I do. Is this unusual?