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(l)uriel has passed away

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Re: (l)uriel has passed away

#101

Post by philh »

potatolicious wrote: post #95
chc wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you just said, it's to prevent the whack-a-mole game of impotently banning an endless stream of new accounts. Being a jerk is strongly correlated with not respecting bans — if they cared about your wishes in the first place, they wouldn't have acted so inconsiderate. If you ban a jerk, they make a new account and keep at it. If you hellban them, they tend to stay that way for a good long while. I do think there sh…

> "Being a jerk is strongly correlated with not respecting bans" Big citation needed on this. If anything, look at the namesake of this post - this is a guy who was banned for inflammatory views, but there is no indication that he was riling people up for the sake of it, and no indication that he would've become the incessant ban-dodger had he known he was banned. I don't think the link between espousing inflammatory…

> there is no indication that he was riling people up for the sake of it, and no indication that he would've become the incessant ban-dodger had he known he was banned.

Point of order: he did discover he was banned, and he did dodge it.

(I have no problem with this, because he shouldn't have been banned, and because we long ago reached the point where it's perfectly reasonable for a user to trust their own judgement over that of a moderator.)

Re: (l)uriel has passed away

#102

Post by burntsushi »

aaronbasssett wrote: post #79
forgotusername wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It most certainly wasn't meant as a jab, more genuine sorrow for the industry's growing maturity. The disconnected, experimental environment where even a modem was a luxury, that gave rise to the kind of exotic personalities common of the 80s (and 90s - dare I even include myself) has steadily been replaced by a well understood lifestyle common to millions. I wouldn't have thought it controversial to say that as a re…

"exotic personalities common of the 80s". He would have been a baby/toddler in the 80s. You do know he was only 30?

And 90s....

Re: (l)uriel has passed away

#103

Post by Udo »

fusiongyro wrote: post #61
dmorgan wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, because "free speech" is nice and all, but there are some opinions that you should not have, even on a liberal place like Hacker News. One should not be allowed to divert from popular opinion (be it popular in society in general, in some conservative circle, or merely popular within the hip crowd), even if he is not being trollish and is providing arguments about it. In issues where most HN people agree, you sho…

Free speech is something the government guarantees its citizens. It's not something every website on the internet owes you.

You are correct. However, these days significant portions of our communications are carried, curated, and distributed only through corporations - to the point where many people rightly feel those corporations have at least as much effect on our life as the government, without being held to the same standards of course. Expecting only governments to honor rights such as free speech does feel a little anachronistic in a world that's increasingly controlled by powerful economic interests. Restricting the obligation to honor human rights to governments is starting to look like a giant loophole, a legislative bug emerging from a legacy system.

Though I do not share these concerns as far as message board moderation is concerned, I believe there is often a good reason why people tend to invoke free speech instinctively in these cases. The expectation is that basic rights are not so much special allowances patronizingly handed down from the government intended for an increasingly narrow context but should instead be understood as innate personhood rights enabling people to live a free and dignified life.

Re: (l)uriel has passed away

#104

Post by TheAmazingIdiot »

chc wrote: post #92
TheAmazingIdiot wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not discuss topics of ethics like "women are inferior"? If these conclusions are oh so horribly wrong, then bringing them out 'in the sun' should make them self evident they are not true. And beyond that, people who make claims such as that usually have false premises in which that and other statements of fact are also just as incorrect. The statement about people who baselessly insult (Mac-fag and ilk) we can do…

> Why not discuss topics of ethics like "women are inferior"? > If these conclusions are oh so horribly wrong, then bringing them out 'in the sun' should make them self evident they are not true. You might think that, but in practice they're just shouting matches that accomplish nothing but offense. Those discussions will not convince people who are committed to their views (who are the ones most likely to start a "w…

Perhaps you're right. There are some topics best left for others to 'discuss'. For example, common topics like Nazis, Jews, Islam, abortion, inferior women, blacks.

However, these were not topics I had in mind for ethics or such. We deal with in this community the ethics and morality of business and commerce. Along side, we deal with programmers who can do great good or great harm. These are more controversial topics I think about.

  DRM
  (RI/MP)AA
  governments (US and others)
  Immigration 
  piracy
  filesharing technology
  bitcoin
  laws intersecting commerce (AirBNB, UBER)
I think you're right. In cases of people acting like a 'shitcock', doing _something_ seems rational to keep the community in check. But stopping people who only want to interrupt the community is much different than those that take hard stances elsewhere.

As an example, I use GNU extensively and am a communist (used in sense of economic policy). I also have no issue in using pirated anything. That right there probably goes against 99% of the companies present.

Re: (l)uriel has passed away

#105

Post by JabavuAdams »

TheAmazingIdiot wrote: post #91
chc wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amy Hoy and Thomas Ptacek strongly disagree with both the majority here and Paul Graham himself all the time, yet they aren't hellbanned. It's not just "straying outside the hive" or "failing to toe the party line" — much of the time, it's expressing offensive opinions (e.g. "women are inferior"), trying to shove your opinion down people's throats to the detriment of the site overall (e.g. losethos' weird Christian r…

Why not discuss topics of ethics like "women are inferior"? If these conclusions are oh so horribly wrong, then bringing them out 'in the sun' should make them self evident they are not true. And beyond that, people who make claims such as that usually have false premises in which that and other statements of fact are also just as incorrect. The statement about people who baselessly insult (Mac-fag and ilk) we can do…

It's a question of venue and audience. I don't want to have to discuss whether or not black are inferior every time I go to my local hangout to get a coffee.

I may choose to, and have chosen to debate whether or not blacks are inferior, but it's stressful and annoying. It's something better reserved for a certain frame of mind and known venue.

So, I assume that given some threshold of are-women-inferior discussions, many interesting women just stop showing up at your party. It's natural that certain topics are more sensitive (especially to people placed on the defensive), and that you don't just drop them like bombs in an unrelated conversation / venue.

Re: (l)uriel has passed away

#106

Post by JabavuAdams »

forgotusername wrote: post #15

Really sorry to hear this, IRC just became a much less interesting place. My experience of Uriel is sadly limited to the occasional joust where his fabulously distinctive views of the world and technology were always apparent, and deeply admirable. One of the old guard falls, inevitably to be replaced by 100 more squawking, jibbering, passionless "geeks" unwilling to form unique opinions of their own accord. Here's t…

You should have stopped at "deeply admirable." That would have been much stronger and resistant to refutation.

Re: (l)uriel has passed away

#107

Post by Evgeny »

tripzilch wrote: post #41
wisty wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hellbanning is necessary to keep the trolls out. The problem is, HN's hellbans are really clunky, especially given how pg practically invented spam filters. You'd think there'd be some kind of bayesian predictor on whether a poster is a troll, and modding them troll would simply increase the probability that their posts would be DOAd.

> Hellbanning is necessary to keep the trolls out. No it is NOT. You do understand what hellbanning is, right? It means hiding their posts from everyone but them . That's right, if you were hellbanned, you wouldn't know. Read this: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-or-h... Hellbanning, as opposed to regular banning, a warning system or suspensions, is counterproductive, a giant waste of people's…

I've seen some of the poor sods keep on writing comments (that people who did not switch on "show dead" cannot see) for over a year.

I switched on "show dead" and immediately came across a guy who seems to be hellbanned 463 days ago and still is posting ... now I feel heartbroken. I can only imagine what he would feel ...

Re: (l)uriel has passed away

#108

Post by karpe »

astine wrote: post #53
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #2

For anyone else who needs more context: http://www.advogato.org/person/uriel/ and http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=uriel edit: His more recent account was http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=luriel I dug up those links because I was completely unfamiliar with uriel before seeing this post, and know nothing more about this story than that. From reading his comments, he seemed like a really smart guy. It's really a…

It's worth mentioning that Uriel was one of the major contributors to http://suckless.org/ software. Things like wmii, dwm, dmenu, and other minimalist bits of software for Linux were partly his doing. He will be missed.

this is bs, he was around all those projects but in terms of code his contributions are close to zero. frankly, i don't care about his death more than i care about any other human beings death.
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