> Many Americans—and many people who, though not American, enjoy watching from a safe distance as predictable fiascoes unfold in this theoretical superpower from week to week—find themselves now pondering one question.
This is way too much spite for an article about coins. Lord.
If the author of the article had done a bit of searching, they might know that Canadians (the primary predictable American ficasco spectators) phased out pennies years ago. We also "had no plan" for the remaining pennies, and we didn't really need one. They get deposited, lost, and thrown away over time—that's why the mint had to keep printing them. Now they've gone the way of the 50-cent piece. It's not a big deal. Frankly I'm surprised the US didn't do it sooner.
The problem is not strictly the pennies themselves, but all of the prices that rely on being able to quantize things to a cent, and a number of different laws about not playing games with prices.
Most recently, a stick in the SNAP benefits laws is that you can't charge SNAP recipients different amounts from other people - which was presumably intended to ensure you can't play games like charging SNAP recipients more for things, but in practice, means that if you, hypothetically, wanted to charge SNAP and credit card holders exact amounts (which you would likely want to do to avoid weird effects where SNAP recipients, who tend to be very price sensitive, find their bills going up), and charge cash users rounded up or down, you would be in violation.
Those are the kinds of warts you would hope to see a plan for before these things were announced, rather than having to figure out one in the middle.
It's not acceptable to attack fellow community members like this on HN. Critiquing the article is fine, as is flagging it if you think it's unfit for HN. But personal attacks are not OK, no matter who it is or why you think it's justifiable. Please read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them if you want to keep participating here.
Since you're speaking as a moderator I'd like to ask for clarification on the official position:
Was that actually a personal attack, or was it a verifiable claim about the quantity and type of submissions by this user? Is the problem that it was labeled "propaganda", and would it have been ok without that word?
I thought it was useful context to have a look at the submission history. There is a slew of recent [dead] submissions. At what point is it fair to call that out? Or is it about the wording?
It's generally not OK to bring up someone's past activity, whether that activity be on HN or elsewhere, as way of attacking someone in a discussion on HN. It fits within the "generic tangents" guideline. We can never know if they still agree with what they said or posted in the past. The submitter's history, and indeed the submitter's identity, is not really relevant to the substance of the article, and we want the discussion to be about the substance of the article. (Of course it's relevant if the submitter is the author, because then they can engage in Q&A about the article's content.)
If users notice that someone is posting large volumes of low-quality content (i.e., spam, self-promotional content or articles that break the guidelines) they can email us and we'll investigate.
In this case the user in question just posts a lot of stuff from mainstream publications on either side of the ideological centre – i.e., lots from the NY Times, Washington Post and The Atlantic but also WSJ and Bloomberg. The articles that are [dead] are from sites like The Information that are only banned due to being hard-paywalled.
It's obviously inflammatory to describe their pattern of posting as "propaganda". (Sure it can be argued and debated in the right context, but this is not that.) But even without the word "propaganda", the guidelines still ask us to keep discussions on-topic and to avoid generic tangents.
This is way too much spite for an article about coins. Lord.