Comment by dredmorbius

Agreed on both the advice and the difficulty of engaging in practice.

What I'll frequently do where a counterparty has looped back to an earlier position is to simply link directly to my earlier response to that point, with the implicit statement "we've already covered this ground, I'm not going to repeat myself".

Walking away from such discussions is still challenging as there's always a temptation to respond. This is where employing HN's thread-collapse feature is useful. I'll typically do this at some point above my final response. The threads remain closed until the post is about two weeks old per earlier discussions with dang.