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Tainnor commented on Trump Orders National Guard to Washington and Takeover of Capital’s Police   nytimes.com/live/2025/08/... · Posted by u/Tadpole9181
tomhow · 12 days ago
Rayiner takes a lot of arrows on HN because he is (particularly these days) one of a tiny few who is notable for advocating conservative/libertarian positions. Those words in his comment weren't great but they were more of a commentary on society than a personal attack.

As for there being “a sizeable and vocal minority of users that are very right wing authoritarian”: without links to comments or account names I'm not able to gauge what you mean. But I'm in the threads every day and the political skew is clearly in opposition to the U.S. administration and to the the left of the broader population, which you would expect of a population sample dominated by tech industry employees and freelancers. But it's still a bell curve, which means, yes, there are some people here who are to the right of centre. That shouldn't be surprising or undesirable if we want to debate important topics.

If you see toxic material that hasn't been flagged/killed, you should flag it and/or email the moderators about it. It's fine to criticize us if you've done that and we haven't taken adequate action, but you've cited no cases of that.

Tainnor · 12 days ago
> Rayiner takes a lot of arrows on HN because he is (particularly these days) one of a tiny few who is notable for advocating conservative/libertarian positions. Those words in his comment weren't great but they were more of a commentary on society than a personal attack.

Thank you, this reply tells me everything I need to know.

Tainnor commented on Trump Orders National Guard to Washington and Takeover of Capital’s Police   nytimes.com/live/2025/08/... · Posted by u/Tadpole9181
tomhow · 12 days ago
The “problem” you keep referring to can be boiled down to: extremes exist. HN, like any large population sample, is a bell curve of opinion, which, by definition has tails of extreme opinion at each end. However the most extreme and toxic opinions rarely get seen because they are taken care of by community flags and moderator bans.

They are covered by the first two words of the “In Comments” section of the guidelines: “be kind”, which apply to all of us, including you, in the way you are engaging with others in this thread.

Please stop.

Tainnor · 12 days ago
> the way you are engaging with others in this thread

The only person I engaged with negatively here was a person who called me "marinated in liberal propaganda", something that notably you didn't take issue with. I will admit that I should have just ignored that person and will try to disengage in the future. Or maybe just avoid this site altogether.

I did however call out that there's a sizable and vocal minority of users that are very right wing authoritarian and I stand by that assessment. I also disagree that these toxic opinions "rarely get seen", I see them a ton. And my ultimate point is that this serves to ultimately drive away more moderate voices.

Whether or not you consider that to be a problem is up to you.

Tainnor commented on Trump Orders National Guard to Washington and Takeover of Capital’s Police   nytimes.com/live/2025/08/... · Posted by u/Tadpole9181
rayiner · 12 days ago
You’re calling people “Nazis” and I’m the one arguing in bad faith?

If you keep calling people Nazis for views on policing that are to the left of Nixon and Lee Kuan Yew then they’ll start assuming you’re an anarchist.

Tainnor · 12 days ago
I didn't call anyone a Nazi because I don't like the inflationary use of that term. But the "Nazi bar problem" is, unfortunately, an established metaphor. It doesn't have to be about literal Nazis, it could be about tankies for all I care. The problem is the same.

I'm going to keep calling people right-wing authoritarian and possibly fascist not for supporting more policing, but for supporting a person who has shown repeatedly that they want to rule as an authoritarian leader and is now implementing another step of that policy.

It literally doesn't matter how bad crime in DC is, because the danger of allowing a person who has denied losing an election for 4 years to single-handedly take over the capital of the most powerful country on earth is so high, in the same way as it didn't matter whether communists actually did or didn't set fire to the Reichstag.

This is what this is about. Not reasonable disagreement about policing, or immigration.

But of course, your only response to opposing authoritarianism is that one has to be some sort of anarchist.

Rest assured that I would react exactly the same if I was talking to a Tankie who was supporting some sort of Stalinist dictatorship.

Tainnor commented on Trump Orders National Guard to Washington and Takeover of Capital’s Police   nytimes.com/live/2025/08/... · Posted by u/Tadpole9181
rayiner · 12 days ago
Dude, we here on HN are the moderates. My muslim immigrant mom the other day posted on facebook “NYPD should independently rull [rule] NYC.” You have no idea how much the average person in the world hates criminals and social disorder. You’re just marinated in half a century of western liberal propaganda.
Tainnor · 12 days ago
I hate criminals and social disorder too.

You're part of the problem that I'm talking about. Instead of engaging with the issue at hand, you jump to wild assumptions about my positions, as if there were no alternatives between absolute anarchy and full-on authoritarianism.

That's what I mean by "poisoning the well", you have 124268 karma and yet you can't help yourself but discuss in bad faith.

Tainnor commented on Trump Orders National Guard to Washington and Takeover of Capital’s Police   nytimes.com/live/2025/08/... · Posted by u/Tadpole9181
Tainnor · 12 days ago
It's frustrating precisely because even a small amount of bad faith actors can serve to poison the well. It's a problem that ultimately every online community has to deal with in some way.

Dead Comment

Tainnor commented on The Article in the Most Languages   en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wik... · Posted by u/vhcr
rsynnott · 12 days ago
That is a most improper suggestion on this here orange website. It is established etiquette to _imagine what the content of the article might be_, based on the title, and then comment on that, preferably angrily. At _absolute most_ one can read the first paragraph.
Tainnor · 12 days ago
And when called out on it reply that the comments are often more interesting than the article which is a) trivially true when you don't read the article and b) probably because bickering in comments is more emotionally satisfying and requires a shorter attention span than reading a rather long article (I'm not immune, seeing as I'm now bickering about the bickering).
Tainnor commented on The Article in the Most Languages   en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wik... · Posted by u/vhcr
emilfihlman · 12 days ago
I find the hubris of this article absolutely disheartening, and toxic, and it frankly just reinforces how Wikipedia isn't a good place, and people who shouldn't have control over it have control over it.

And it isn't because of the self promoting described, but because of the response to it.

Deletionists are evil.

Tainnor · 12 days ago
Apart from the fact that this was pure self-promotion, it was also spamming the Wikipedias of small language communities with low-effort autotranslated garbage, which I think is rather insulting.
Tainnor commented on Fight Chat Control   fightchatcontrol.eu/... · Posted by u/tokai
msgodel · 13 days ago
It sounds to me like the Europeans need to have an actual fight (that is with bullets and artillery) with this weird EU pseudo government thing. It sounds like a loss for them to me.
Tainnor · 13 days ago
The UK left the EU and is pushing very similar sorts of dangerous nonsense legislation when it comes to the internet, so this is clearly not just a EU thing.
Tainnor commented on The current state of LLM-driven development   blog.tolki.dev/posts/2025... · Posted by u/Signez
Karrot_Kream · 14 days ago
> I wish we had at least the same amount of discussions about those things I mentioned above as we have about whether Opus, Sonnet, GPT5 or Gemini is the best model.

I mean we do. I think programmers are more interested in long term maintainable software than its users are. Generally that makes sense, a user doesn't really care how much effort it takes to add features or fix bugs, these are things that programmers care about. Moreover the cost of mistakes of most software is so low that most people don't seem interested in paying extra for more reliable software. The few areas of software that require high reliability are the ones regulated or are sold by companies that offer SLAs or other such reliability agreements.

My observation over the years is that maintainability and reliability are much more important to programmers who comment in online forums than they are to users. It usually comes with the pride of work that programmers have but my observation is that this has little market demand.

Tainnor · 14 days ago
Users definitely care about things like reliability when they're using actually important software (which probably excludes a lot of startup junk). They may not be able to point to what causes issues, but they obviously do complain when things are buggy as hell.

u/Tainnor

KarmaCake day4317October 31, 2019View Original