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Are you really sure you need to steer this conversation towards dispute? Because basically you're criticizing someone's experience of how they gracefully integ

Are you really sure you need to steer this conversation towards dispute? Because basically you're criticizing someone's experience of how they gracefully integrated ajax once upon a time. Like, in the past. I don't want people on HN to stop telling me what they did and how they handled situations, in the past, because they keep seeing that whenever someone like Smudge does that, someone like gkya really, really, urgently feel the need to tell them how they did it all wrong.

gkya 10y ago
> I don't want people on HN to stop telling me what they did ... because ... whenever ... Smudge does that, someone like gkya really, really, urgently feel the need to tell them how they did it all wrong. i.e. they discuss, on a discussion forum? > ... you're criticizing someone's experience of how they gracefully integrated ajax once upon a time. Like, in the past. Yes, what's the problem with that? He, as a developer, poses a way to do something, and I refute it as a person on the other side of the wire, i.e. the user/hacker. Where else than Hacker News is more apt for this sort of discussion?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- escape_goat 10y ago
  My tone, previously, was not entirely useful, so firstly my apologies for that, I could have said the same thing in a less aggrieved way. As to your questions, well, I'd like you to consider my words in the context of the distinction between discussion, debate, and dispute. I believe I already adequately addressed what the "problem with that" was, but I'll reiterate it more clearly. Smudge was telling a story about a solution that he applied to a problem he was facing at one time, what the benefits and drawbacks of it were, and how it eventually led him to have respect for the value of React. He was sharing history. It was interesting. It would be interesting to discuss it if one had questions about the technical aspects of the thing he had done in the past, which he had shared with the audience in this forum, or rejected a similar solution at that time for reason one cared to describe. Smudge was not introducing or participating in a debate. He did not state a proposal. He did not invite a counter-proposal. He did not advocate anything. There is no debating that he did this thing. There is no debating that he did it for the reasons that he described. There is no debating that he came to the conclusions as a consequence of this experience that he shared with us. The statements that you have made seem to show a pattern of inattention to what is actually being said. You are not debating with anyone. Smudge did not intend to invite a debate, and he should not have had any reason to think differently. Instead, your behaviour is obnoxious, self-involved, and anti-social, because it would tend to discourage people who did not want to engage in debates with you from sharing history with the audience of the forum. What you were pursuing changed from debate to dispute. Firstly, rather than rebut points that had been made in the context in which they arose, you pursued disagreement beyond the bounds of the actual context of the matter under discussion. To give an example, whether or not "browsers are very smart these days" is not material to a discussion of how one developer implemented ajax updates with graceful degradation once upon a time when browsers were not very smart. You were not debating with Smudge, most basically because Smudge did not want or try to have a debate with you. You were not debating with Smudge because your statements were of little value in the context of what the topic of a debate would have been --- which would be something akin to 'decisions web developers made when faced with web developer problems [once upon a time]' --- and, by themselves, suggested that you were actually unfamiliar with this topic. Your words suggested a desire to turn a discussion into a dispute about a topic that Smudge was not discussing, and which was so tangentially related to the actual topic at hand that I would have found your need to dump your opinions upon this person as argumentation offensive even had you not stretched them to the ridiculous conclusion that front-end web development was a rent-seeking activity. To add the final part to what I had said before: behaving like this will discourage people from sharing their opinions and experiences. Just because someone said something, it does not mean that they or anyone else cares that you have opinions about a related topic or that that person is inviting you to criticize them. Wait until the lines of an actual debate have actually formed before you attempt to engage in a debate with someone, and never, never crash someone's thread in order to insist that they must debate you regarding a topic you yourself have brought to the table. Extending the reply to your last statements: firstly, no, Smudge did not propose a way to do something. You misread what he wrote. My apologies for the bewilderment that my response must cause you if you genuinely, rather than wilfully, misread what he wrote. However, he did not invite a debate, and your behaviour was not appropriate. If you thought that it was, it would serve you well to learn why it was not. Secondly, you did not 'refute' what he said. Your statements bore no relation to a refutation. "Everyone should use the latest web browser" is no more a solution to a problem than "Everyone should eat cake". Telling a person that they should use the 'default widgets' rather than write a very thin javascript library because you don't like too much javascript is confusing. What 'default widgets'? What do you mean by that... jQuery widgets? HTML does not come with 'default widgets'. Yes a lot of websites are clogged with useless shit, and yes you have a perfect right to not like this. But you can't 'refute' the decisions that a web developer makes "from the other side of the wire", and this is true of anything else or any other similar situation. You can't 'refute' a judicial decision on the basis of your own interpretation of written law. You have to learn about actual law first. You have to come to his side of the wire first. You could certainly refute mis-statement of fact, if you knew it to be incorrect, but you cannot refute a decision without understanding the context in which it was made.
  - gkya 10y ago
    If there's one thing that's off-topic in this whole thread for this submission, that is this comment you posted, which is longer than the 4-comment thread that started with my initial reply to Smudge and you didn't like. You call me obnoxious, self-involved and anti-social, offending me personally. And you procede to tell me what I can or can not do, and guessing my thoughts and mindset, and deciding for other people what would discourage them from posting online. I will not respond to any other comment you may make, as you seem to be a self-proclaimed judge of online correspondence, which is not all that sane.
    - sillysaurus3 10y ago
      It's best to flag off-topic comments. Especially ones that make the conversation personal.
      - gkya 10y ago
        The flag link is a sassy little thing, it sometimes shows up and sometimes doesn't. In this case it didn't.
        dang 10y ago
        It doesn't show up on direct replies to oneself. Same with downvote arrow. In such cases the system automatically recuses you and you have to rely on your fellow users to correct misbehavior, or in egregious cases email hn@ycombinator.com so we can look into it.
dang 10y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11741624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11741624 and marked it off-topic.
- escape_goat 10y ago
  Yeah, mea culpa, I accept that that was the correct place to detach it. Regardless of what I might have thought I was accomplishing, it was ultimately tangental, personal, of no value to those who simply wanted to read the thread, and started by myself rather than the other party. I will think twice before kibitzing on a thread like that in the future.

gkya 10y ago

> I don't want people on HN to stop telling me what they did ... because ... whenever ... Smudge does that, someone like gkya really, really, urgently feel the need to tell them how they did it all wrong. i.e. they discuss, on a discussion forum? > ... you're criticizing someone's experience of how they gracefully integrated ajax once upon a time. Like, in the past. Yes, what's the problem with that? He, as a developer, poses a way to do something, and I refute it as a person on the other side of the wire, i.e. the user/hacker. Where else than Hacker News is more apt for this sort of discussion?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
escape_goat 10y ago
My tone, previously, was not entirely useful, so firstly my apologies for that, I could have said the same thing in a less aggrieved way. As to your questions, well, I'd like you to consider my words in the context of the distinction between discussion, debate, and dispute. I believe I already adequately addressed what the "problem with that" was, but I'll reiterate it more clearly. Smudge was telling a story about a solution that he applied to a problem he was facing at one time, what the benefits and drawbacks of it were, and how it eventually led him to have respect for the value of React. He was sharing history. It was interesting. It would be interesting to discuss it if one had questions about the technical aspects of the thing he had done in the past, which he had shared with the audience in this forum, or rejected a similar solution at that time for reason one cared to describe. Smudge was not introducing or participating in a debate. He did not state a proposal. He did not invite a counter-proposal. He did not advocate anything. There is no debating that he did this thing. There is no debating that he did it for the reasons that he described. There is no debating that he came to the conclusions as a consequence of this experience that he shared with us. The statements that you have made seem to show a pattern of inattention to what is actually being said. You are not debating with anyone. Smudge did not intend to invite a debate, and he should not have had any reason to think differently. Instead, your behaviour is obnoxious, self-involved, and anti-social, because it would tend to discourage people who did not want to engage in debates with you from sharing history with the audience of the forum. What you were pursuing changed from debate to dispute. Firstly, rather than rebut points that had been made in the context in which they arose, you pursued disagreement beyond the bounds of the actual context of the matter under discussion. To give an example, whether or not "browsers are very smart these days" is not material to a discussion of how one developer implemented ajax updates with graceful degradation once upon a time when browsers were not very smart. You were not debating with Smudge, most basically because Smudge did not want or try to have a debate with you. You were not debating with Smudge because your statements were of little value in the context of what the topic of a debate would have been --- which would be something akin to 'decisions web developers made when faced with web developer problems [once upon a time]' --- and, by themselves, suggested that you were actually unfamiliar with this topic. Your words suggested a desire to turn a discussion into a dispute about a topic that Smudge was not discussing, and which was so tangentially related to the actual topic at hand that I would have found your need to dump your opinions upon this person as argumentation offensive even had you not stretched them to the ridiculous conclusion that front-end web development was a rent-seeking activity. To add the final part to what I had said before: behaving like this will discourage people from sharing their opinions and experiences. Just because someone said something, it does not mean that they or anyone else cares that you have opinions about a related topic or that that person is inviting you to criticize them. Wait until the lines of an actual debate have actually formed before you attempt to engage in a debate with someone, and never, never crash someone's thread in order to insist that they must debate you regarding a topic you yourself have brought to the table. Extending the reply to your last statements: firstly, no, Smudge did not propose a way to do something. You misread what he wrote. My apologies for the bewilderment that my response must cause you if you genuinely, rather than wilfully, misread what he wrote. However, he did not invite a debate, and your behaviour was not appropriate. If you thought that it was, it would serve you well to learn why it was not. Secondly, you did not 'refute' what he said. Your statements bore no relation to a refutation. "Everyone should use the latest web browser" is no more a solution to a problem than "Everyone should eat cake". Telling a person that they should use the 'default widgets' rather than write a very thin javascript library because you don't like too much javascript is confusing. What 'default widgets'? What do you mean by that... jQuery widgets? HTML does not come with 'default widgets'. Yes a lot of websites are clogged with useless shit, and yes you have a perfect right to not like this. But you can't 'refute' the decisions that a web developer makes "from the other side of the wire", and this is true of anything else or any other similar situation. You can't 'refute' a judicial decision on the basis of your own interpretation of written law. You have to learn about actual law first. You have to come to his side of the wire first. You could certainly refute mis-statement of fact, if you knew it to be incorrect, but you cannot refute a decision without understanding the context in which it was made.
- gkya 10y ago
  If there's one thing that's off-topic in this whole thread for this submission, that is this comment you posted, which is longer than the 4-comment thread that started with my initial reply to Smudge and you didn't like. You call me obnoxious, self-involved and anti-social, offending me personally. And you procede to tell me what I can or can not do, and guessing my thoughts and mindset, and deciding for other people what would discourage them from posting online. I will not respond to any other comment you may make, as you seem to be a self-proclaimed judge of online correspondence, which is not all that sane.
  - sillysaurus3 10y ago
    It's best to flag off-topic comments. Especially ones that make the conversation personal.
    - gkya 10y ago
      The flag link is a sassy little thing, it sometimes shows up and sometimes doesn't. In this case it didn't.
      - dang 10y ago
        It doesn't show up on direct replies to oneself. Same with downvote arrow. In such cases the system automatically recuses you and you have to rely on your fellow users to correct misbehavior, or in egregious cases email hn@ycombinator.com so we can look into it.

dang 10y ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11741624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11741624 and marked it off-topic.

escape_goat 10y ago
Yeah, mea culpa, I accept that that was the correct place to detach it. Regardless of what I might have thought I was accomplishing, it was ultimately tangental, personal, of no value to those who simply wanted to read the thread, and started by myself rather than the other party. I will think twice before kibitzing on a thread like that in the future.