Comment by dang
2 days ago
Can you please not post snarky comments or shallow dismissals to Hacker News? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
No one is saying you owe billionaires better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
@dang, I get what you mean in a vacuum but this article is pretty insulting to the readers intelligence.
The third sentence of the article is
> But one misstep he admitted to might surprise a lot of people who dream of the day they can quit their 9-to-5.
Does anyone really believe the co founder of google retiring after their rise to supremacy in search was the equivalent of someone quitting their 9-5?
They might have well said “Google co-founder shares secrets that stealing bread to eat when you’re hungry and sleeping under bridges is actually illegal”
I hear you! I didn't read the entire article but I agree it doesn't exactly pattern-match to very good. We highly prefer articles that respect the reader's intelligence; they aren't always easy to come by.
The lede is that Sergey is back full-time at Google and I haven't happened to see any other post about that, let alone a good one. If there's a better article, we can consider changing the link.
(and in any case, people still should not be posting things like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46452725 to HN, no matter how bad an article is—so the moderation point stands.)
The article is not about Sergey Brin, he is just the hook. It’s about the loss of meaning people can face after retiring, which can happen to anyone who is able to retire. That’s not everyone, but it’s also not just billionaires.
I do not accept that the analogy was made without an implicit attempt to conflate the two positions.
Most tech jobs aren’t a 9-5 either since that’s a traditional hourly job and tech has on call rotations that are unpaid.
This is what I’m talking about with the article insulting the readers intelligence. If you wanted to make the point of “people who retire should be aware that they need to find meaning outside of work” then it could just say so, instead of trying to act like it’s so hard to be so wealthy that there is no more struggle in life and you need to invent new ones for yourself.
Of all the things people say here (myself absolutely included), this is what got your personal attention? That's kind of interesting.
I've posted 23 comments in the last 24 hours, 386 in the last month, 4828 in the last year. Plenty of things get my attention!
A couple points that are important, if you want to understand how moderation works on HN:
(1) we're mostly responding to a random sample of the total - there's far too much content for us to read it all.
I have the impression that when someone posts a "you're moderating this, of all things?" comment, as you did here, it's usually because they've seen other cases where a comment ought to have been moderated but wasn't. Then the moderators' priorities start to look strange. The likeliest explanation for this, though, is that we just didn't see it (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
(2) I've already forgotten point #2. Sorry! I fear that my short-term memory window is getting ever smaller - this is the 'sandblast' phenomenon (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
It's good to have you back. It wasn't the same.
It is everywhere now. Musk censors his X responses, Grok defends billionaires, the all-in podcast has only positive comments in suspiciously perfect English since a month or so. Previously they allowed criticism.
(And hardly anyone mentions Greenland on X.)
HN hasn't changed in this respect in a good 10 years, and no one who sees what gets posted here need fear that criticism is verboten. It isn't, and will never be. We do need to do something about shallow cynicism though (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46515507 from earlier today, if curious).
What is the correct style to use to point out that there is nothing in this article beyond the news that a specific person got bored?
Maybe say exactly that? You can convey the sentiment without the snark, which can seem corrosive to community.
I think the snark comes from (and becomes merited through) an article that shows such an utter lack of empathy towards the problems that the vast majority face on a day-to-day basis.
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I'm also going to dissent with a "but is it a shallow rebuttal?" here? TFA is a of the "problems we wish we had" sort — we're all just temporarily embarrassed billionaires here, right guys? Right?! (Because a mere million doesn't cut it, these days…) But the rank and file of us are still on Duck Tales, Larry. Especially these days.
As I said in a separate comment, TFA is distinctly lacks empathy.