Can you please not post unsubstantive comments to HN? We're trying for higher-quality discussion, to the extent that that's possible on the internet.

This is particularly important when a thread is fresh because threads are so sensitive to initial conditions.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Given that the title was changed after my comment, I'd say that the comment was substantive, and contributed to the conversation.

Questioning that there's a homeless crisis when the data shown in the submission states that there's north of 500,000 homeless in the US is an absurd starting point for a conversation.

That is, _there is no conversation to be had about that question_. And any debate held by HN on that would be astoundingly privileged.

You posted your comment and I posted my reply before we changed the title. It was clearly a snarky and informationless comment, which you shouldn't have posted. A title change doesn't retroactively reverse that.

Of course, if you had posted a substantive comment about homelessness in response to specific things in the article, that would have been fine. That's very much not what you posted.

As for "there is no conversation to be had"—this is the sort of categorical putdown that tends to go along with unsubstantive posts in the first place. Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines? We're looking for curious conversation here, not position-hammering. There's a big difference between those, even if all of your views are 100% correct. Launching straight into a flamewar when the thread is brand new is definitely not the intended use of this site.

Of course they didn't answer the question—that would require relevant information. A substanceless oneliner (and in the form of an internet trope, even) is not that.

Surely it isn't hard to understand that "Yes. Yes there is." is an unsubstantive comment. This is not a borderline call.

You realize there's a whole article attached to the title, right? Is there an article associated to the unsubstansive response that I missed?

dang does not "pretend to claim to know that there isn't a homeless criss". Don't put words in his mouth; that is very much not cool.

What dang does know is that, by HN standards, chrsig's answer was pretty useless. He's asking chrsig to do better, not to have a different answer.

And of course, the law holds true here. There is a crisis in some parts of the US but overall, the homeless rate has been relatively stable.

Even so it’d be nice to know if this number is acceptable at a given level of economic maturity as well as level of employable skills. If there is a skills gap or a mental health gap, are those comparable to similar economies or worse or maybe better?

Is there a reason for the richest country in history to have homelessness anywhere?