There is no place for this kind of comment on HN. You could just as easily have written this without personalizing it; it still wouldn't be a great HN comment (picking a fight over ticket scalping on a thread about Alinea is impolite), but it wouldn't be an awful comment. This, on the other hand, is an awful comment.
Sorry, someone says proudly how they instigate a practice I find pretty awful and would like to apply their behaviour to yet another market, and I'm supposed to not comment on it or make it personal?
The bigger issue is that you know absolutely nothing about me, and my thought experiment as to whether or not a secondary market would be feasible is not grounds for you calling me a terrible person.
There are legitimate reasons for secondary markets, especially given that the tickets are available for resale by the producer, but we won't go into this now.
You should know that I had the same questions about arbitrage as you, and walked away from millions of dollars as a result. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6736330). I gave up everything, lived in a car for three months, and still have absolutely no idea if I'll ever be able to make that back or how I'll provide for my family long-term.
That is why you don't make an argument personal on the Internet (and specifically HackerNews). Because you know absolutely nothing about the person you're calling out.
These kinds of arguments are like chess openings. If you've been here long enough, you know how the thread is going to end up many hours before it ends. This particular game doesn't end well. Don't personalize.
To directly address your point and why I disagree- what we're really talking about here is the economics concept of consumer surplus. What the OP was eluding to (and he's correct) is the fact that if demand is such that tickets are selling out and people who want tickets are presumably waiting to get them for a later date, then that's a strong signal that there is a large amount of uncaptured consumer surplus. In other words, consumers are taking a profit of value from the restaurant because they are getting tickets for less money than they would have otherwise paid.
To think about the problem differently- occasionally you will come to certain places and see two Starbucks sitting across the street from each other. If you ever wondered why that is, the reason is that in certain locations, demand is so high at peak times that the lines will get so long that large numbers of customers will actually not buy coffee because they aren't willing to wait. Rather than raise prices during these times, Starbucks figured out that it was profitable to open a second adjacent location to service this demand overflow.
I don't mean to sound condescending, but there are two sides to this coin and I think that looking at it from only the customer side is a mistake. The restaurant is losing out on potential profits that the customers are capturing. Traders would simply be capturing the surplus that the restaurant can't or won't. It isn't necessarily being greedy, it's just being smart.
