The "But Google" rebuttal: I was in a city when they had a public transport strike. The buses/trams would run at irregular times, but as far as Google knew (maybe the public transport company told them so), no buses would run at all.
So trying to get anywhere, Google Maps would say "Walk 20 minutes to the nearest train station, take the train, walk 15 minutes to your final destination.". I had to trick it and say I want to depart 6 months in the future so it would show which tram/bus-lines I actually need, where I can go to the stop and take a chance that one would show up..
"In the middle of negotiations" is arguably more and more used as a carte blanche to do whatever you want in the meantime. Prominent recent example being Putin pretending to be ready to negotiate for peace while bombing Ukraine.
The question is really whether negotiations were going on in good faith with the actual goal of realistic compromise.
The branch of government tasked to execute the law has been ignoring laws. So we'll get a (from Trump's point of view) adversarial congress, so what, let's ignore them, what are they going to do about it?
Looking forward to a military platoon defying orders and seizing the president, hey, all countries suffer through coups, about time this young democracy go through one!
Sheesh, an actual Whataboutism. The fact that "the US does it too!" won't help Grandparent poster/his wife if they get detained in China. GP says "there are currently a couple of hundred Americans who are being illegally detained in China right now", most likely they are dual citizens, or were born in China, and from China's point of view, one can't lose the Chinese citizenship, and they're detaining their own citizens.
I would also like to know if these are dual citizens or not. I think it would be newsworthy if hundreds of US passport holders who do not have chinese passports also were being held in China and not charged with any crime and unable to access consular services.
Sensationalizing claims then qualifying them later is inherently dishonest.
> A two sentence comment requesting one piece of information that is highly likely to be collated with the original information for any reputable source
You would describe that as "relentless, harassing, and tangental?" rather than say "I can see how that would be a relevant question, I'm not sure."
I hope your mental health improves in the future, it's unfortunately not possible to assume good faith on your part when you jump to thought terminating cliches.
if (user is null) is leaving me way up in my feelings. Ambiguous value error: 'too true' is not an approved response. Please consult your legislator and try again.
Gotta love the German creativity in naming. It's called "C Net" because that came after "B Net", which came after "A Net". While "A" apparently stood for "Autotelefon" (car phone).
And when D-Net came, T-Mobile called their service D1, and Vodafone called theirs... D2.
There are some trolls in here that seemingly evade getting banned despite their moronic comments...
Also, many comments just take a wrong premise and attack you (e.g. that not wanting the slaughter of innocent people equals supporting terrorists who want to slaughter innocent people). They don't offer anything more than that, so that IMO taking the time to consider their mostly one-note opinion is just wasting said time.
> There are some trolls in here that seemingly evade getting banned despite their moronic comments...
As moderators we can only judge comments according to the guidelines, and can only ban accounts if they repeatedly breach them. You're always welcome to email us (hn@ycombinator.com) about an account that has been continually breaching the guidelines.
I don't have the name(s) off the top of my head, but can't you do a query of users whose account age are greater than (some threshold) but whose median comment score /amount of flagged to death comments is past some other threshold.
Mathematical quality scoring doesn’t work well for moderation of human behaviour in a community. Context matters a lot. Feelings influence people’s conduct and perception of others’ conduct a great deal. A user may get huge numbers of upvotes for comments they make about a technology or their profession, but then attract many downvotes and flags when they're commenting about politics. This is particularly true when political topics involve war or other life/death matters (which is a major reason why those kinds of topics are difficult on HN – they can bring out the worst in otherwise very positive contributors).
Sheesh. I meant that as a step 1 to get a list of suspect users, and then you read the users comments to see if they're all breaking the rules. (The same thing you'd do if you get a report of a user being "moronic" over email)
We already go further than that: we try to look at every single flagged comment, and for any that are egregious, we look further into their history and consider banning them. In this discussion, however, you’re asserting that there are many accounts that should be banned but aren’t, but you won’t name any. We can understand feeling that way, but we can only respond to concrete examples and actionable suggestions.
Plenty of users help us by emailing us about egregious accounts that they notice, and you’re most welcome to do that too. We can take action or reply to you explaining our interpretation of their activity in relation to the guidelines. We’re always happy to explain our thinking once we have a specific example to discuss.
I think that's the point though? Plenty of things not worth engaging with also aren't technically violating any rules: but wasting the brainpower on them also isn't worth it in a reliable way.
Sure, I was just addressing the apparent dissatisfaction that some accounts remain active despite posting “moronic” comments, and pointing out that we can't moderate HN according to our judgement of someone's comments being “moronic”, we can only apply the guidelines that everyone on HN implicitly agrees to follow. (To expand on that: “moronic” will mean different things to different people depending on their worldview; whereas the guidelines and our application of them need to be defensible, regardless of the position.)
We hope that people will take the opportunity that HN offers, to be exposed to different points of view, if only because it helps you to become more knowledgeable and confident about your own positions. We understand not everyone is here for that!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlbirlSA-dc
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