Whoosh?

Nope. The comment I responded to was a low-quality comment, and it irked me that it was at the top. I repeated the same obvious point, only stripped of the sarcasm to show that without the sarcasm, it's a pretty bare statement. If you think that my restatement is facile, then you must be able to recognize that the previous attempt at the same point is, too. Its payload differs only in the sarcasm attached to it, and there's no value in the sarcasm itself.

You were banned for this kind of thing before. Then we saw that your posts had mostly improved, and we unbanned you. If you keep dumping flamebait into HN threads, we are going to ban you again. Actually I've already had to warn you about this several times.

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

The current top of the executive branch made it clear that he equates black lives matter with white supremacists.

Miller and Bannon have gone ridiculously out of their way (and gotten thrown out in the courts over and over) to create explicitly racist policies.

They want to spend trillions to build an ineffectual wall to keep out the "other" - and you say that "the only institutional racism is affirmative action" ... that's what I would expect to hear from a white middle class person whose not experienced any hardship due to their race... ever?

You may say that I'm nitpicking on words, but could you please give an example of an official policy that explicitly mentions race?

I use the mobile version called 'Materialistic', it doesn't show comment score which is probably a good thing. Also only has a vote up button.

It's actually not cool that some third-party apps are modifying the shared space of the community. I've noticed that even some apps that don't do any writes, just display HN data, are significantly breaking the intentions of the site. For example, they'll display dead comments as if they were ordinary comments—and then we get outraged emails from users who ran across $awful-thing in $app and think we condone it. Often they assume that $app is an official HN client, or that it just is HN. Lord knows how much such outrage is circulating on Twitter as well—I can't bear to look.

I'm not sure what to do about this, but there are increasing signs that it's a problem. HN is what it is because it has a specific, opinionated, highly intentional design. It's fine to disagree with that design—plenty of users do. Probably every user does in one way or another. What's not fine is for third party clients to break this design in a way that alters the community itself.

There's also the fact that some apps are now charging money, which feels to me like a violation of HN's spirit, which has always been to be completely free. I like to say that the currency of HN is curiosity, not money, and we'd like to keep it that way.

We may have to produce some sort of standards for HN apps, which is a drag because that sort of bureaucrat is the last thing that any of us is interested in being.

I don’t love it, but in the short term, an easy solution would be to not include dead comments in the api. They are dead, after all.

Yes. That unfortunately leaves the harder questions of what to do with flagged comments and faded comments. These signals are extremely important for calibrating users' perceptions of the community—especially new users.

I can understand removing dead comments because they tend to be more accurate in terms of what the site isn't for but faded comments definitely have mixed signal to noise ratio. It may not be evenly split but it's somewhere around 20:80.

Oh I don't disagree. But the fading is an important element of HN's design—I don't mean its web design, I mean its community design. It's one critical way in which the community signals that it has found something wrong with a comment.

I know that downvoting is controversial and I know that the fading feature is unpopular with some. But it is the way the community works. We can debate it at length and I'll argue that it's a good feature. (I think it was one of pg's master strokes actually. For all its annoyance, it creates important feedback loops, both within the community and between the community and the outside world.) But the point here is that since third party clients are representing HN to the world, there's a need to represent HN as it actually is. Otherwise readers come along, get the wrong idea, and judge the community badly.

To be clear, we don't supply the fading information in the API yet, so third party clients couldn't represent this aspect easily even if they wanted to. But it's an example I've started to think about lately.

Picking up my copy of Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary and looking up "racism", I see "1. a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race" (which isn't relevant to the point being made) and "2. racial prejudice or discrimination" which perfectly describes affirmative action - people of a particular race being discriminated against because of their race. This is literally textbook racism.

I'm really curious what arguments the downvoters of the parent post have to say and why they didn't say them.

You and others are providing a willfully ignorant and overly simplistic presentation of what affirmative action is. Your question is in bad faith.

I don’t agree with a lot of political opinions of others but I don’t try to pretend like I don’t understand where they are coming from. Requiring someone to explain something you already know is how you would keep people eternally occupied with meaningless work, not what you would do to have a fruitful conversation. What you’re doing here is one reason why no one ever makes any progress these days in resolving their differences.

I don't think the question was in bad faith. I don't understand why it would be seen that way.

Many people view affirmative action as racist.

I could even imagine there existing a proponent of affirmative action who says, "Yes, I concede it's racist, but it's racist for the sake of helping the downtrodden, not racist for the sake of hurting the downtrodden, so it's OK."

So if people want to argue against affirmative action, they probably need to say why it's bad specifically, not just that it's racist.

The Wikipedia page[1] on affirmative action says that it includes "promoting diversity", which means artificially adding diversity by discriminating against majorities, which is consistent with my personal experience and the way I've heard other people use the term, and is consistent with he argument that I was making.

Meanwhile, you didn't even attempt to provide nuance to my interpretation of "affirmative action", nor did you try to counter my argument in any way whatsoever. Seems more like you're in bad faith by trying to use a vague claim like "overly simplistic" without providing any sort of support.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action

I firmly believe that race is a primary determinant of some human traits and capacities, such as capacity to spend half a day in the sun without getting burnt.

Look, like any religion, both racism and racial equality statements require careful interpretation by certified personnel. Applying common sense will inevitably lead to blasphemy and the producer of the heresy will be burnt at the stake.