On: Secret contract tied NSA and security industry pio...

[icelancer]

Pretty much. Not only that, but he's incredibly influential, so to see him get knocked down a peg does a lot of good.

[lawnchair_larry → icelancer]

This is a bit much and was not at all the motivation behind my comment.

[pessimizer → lawnchair_larry]

This is what happens when you make it personal, though. I try to let being right be its own reward, not a license to tell people how wrong they were.

[sheetjs → pessimizer]

tptacek has the most karma on HN (even moreso than pg): https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders (for reference, pg has 149712 karma at the time of writing; tptacek has 165020 and the next person has 88887) His opinion is respected by many (and many accept what he says without question). A retraction by tptacek reminds us all to think critically

lawnchair_larry's comment is equivalent to questioning the president or a major celebrity, which oftentimes isn't a personal grudge.

[winfred → sheetjs]

What I do is just not read the usernames (beyond roughly scanning the word to figure out who replied to who). No really, I mean that, I don't even know your username.

That makes for a wonderful experience really. I interact with this nameless entity and each post is largely valued by its responses (I often leave an article open for a few hours to let the comments ripen a bit, that also adds a lot).

[nitrogen → winfred]

I think HN might be designed to encourage this, judging from the lighter color given to the post metadata line.

[oinksoft → sheetjs]

Comparing someone with high comment karma to the president is a bit absurd, no? The president could more aptly be compared to forum moderators on any given discussion website, as both have some executive power.