"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

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

▲

anon_shill 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Does that apply to quotes from an article? They seemed to be criticizing a second or third degree source for being PR, which feels fair.

▲

dang 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes, in the sense that if there's nothing interesting to say about a quote then there's no reason to copy it into the thread.

▲

nrds 2 hours ago | parent [-]

And, of course, "interesting" means "interesting to dang"; whether apparently technical sources have apparently received PR training is therefore not "interesting". Drop the "my preferences are actually just objective truth" routine for once. Why is it so painful to admit you curate this site by preference?

▲

dang 38 minutes ago | parent [-]

It's not a question of painful - I'm happy to "admit" what's true, as best I can, and not what's not true. Let's see if we can sort that out a bit in the present case.

HN is certainly curated - I've been "admitting" that since the day I got outed as a mod here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7494621 (March 2014)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7507229 (April 2014)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7962942 (June 2014)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8569117 (Nov 2014)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15556105 (Oct 2017)

But we try hard to do the curation by principle, not by personal whim. What principles? Really there's just one: intellectual curiosity—we try to feature what enhances that and dampen what degrades it [1]. From that starting point, though, you can derive lots of other principles. Probably the most important is that snark and indignation are bad for HN (especially in combination!) because they drown out curious conversation. That's all that you need to see why I posted that reply to the GP; no personal preference required.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

▲

rat9988 22 minutes ago | parent [-]

The current case still seems very heavy on personal preference. Principles application is subjective as we are all human. I found the comment as interesting as the quote it is answering.

	▲	dang 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It does seem more of a borderline case to me when I reread it, too.