I think there's an important difference between the "man, Wolfram sure likes to make everything about himself, doesn't he?" comments here and the "frist psot im

I think there's an important difference between the "man, Wolfram sure likes to make everything about himself, doesn't he?" comments here and the "frist psot imagine a beowulf cluster of petrified Natalie Portman in hot grits" comments on Slashdot. The Slashdot ones contributed nothing to discussion. They were pure group-signalling; their sole purpose was to enable the people who wrote them and the people who upvoted them to feel "I am part of the in-crowd here." (In fact, their very pointlessness was essential to that role.) The Wolfram comments here are not irrelevant; they are pointing out something that would be worth pointing out -- if if weren't for the fact that by now almost anyone reading an HN discussion of a Wolfram post is already aware that this is what Wolfram does, all the time. Maybe I'm wrong; maybe for some people "hahaha, Wolfram turned the death of an eminent mathematician into a chance to talk again about his own cleverness" is just an attempt at fitting in with the HN crowd, or a crass karma-farming move, or something. But it doesn't look that way. I think the people saying this are genuinely trying to contribute to the discussion, in a way that the Slashdot reflex-posters weren't.