Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Your comment wouldn't be so bad if you had taken out the obvious provocations ("awful personality traits" etc.), but in any case it flew too close to the planet Musk and the whole thread got sucked in. We don't want to die that way.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40589501.)



I did that more in a "let's take this as read and focus on the other things" way i.e. I knew I was going to give Musk a sort of backhanded compliment, and didn't want a bunch of replies from people who hate him, explaining to me carefully and in great detail why they hate him (even though I probably agree with them, it doesn't seem like an interesting discussion to have).

Alas, my efforts were in vain.


I did get that (more or less), and yes that kind of thing is in vain. It just adds complications, e.g. spawning meta levels of offtopicness (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40590135).

Ultimately there's no way to win with these.




Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: