I doubt he will respond to you. It's a pretty classic tactic to request citation from someone you know isn't prepared to offer it in order to defuse an argument. He doesn't have to offer citation, he only has to stop his opponent from appearing knowledgeable.
he doesn't need to be right, he only needs to make the other guy look wrong.
I've no doubt that people ask for citation in the manner suggested, but the gp had a resonable point. In the absense of evidence, it's better to assume what's going on is organic to online discussions.
If you've been on the internet for the last 10 years, this is easy to believe. If not, just visit the phoronix fourms. You'll be astounded by the batshit insane folks.
I mainly just wanted to see an analysis of needless complexity which is organically injected into committee-based standards processes because it could inform my own work which depends so heavily on them. Additionally, when so much of software engineering involves dealing with multiple stakeholders, understanding how people can "concern-troll" a useless or damaging requirement into the process might allow me to diffuse such a situation in the future.
At no point has the interests of any company I've worked with dovetailed with the NSA's. That was a profoundly ignorant and obnoxious accusation to casually lob at anyone.
Yeah, but that's fine. Tptacek is not a sock-puppet, exactly because he's one guy with strong views. Yes, he has a lot of power here, and uses it to shape the discussion, but that's what we want! If we decide we don't like what he's doing, we can down-vote him to oblivion, or just ignore him.
The problem is when one person has 1500 accounts, and just uses them to direct the discussion, without actually contributing to it.
IIRC, tptacek just has a more nuanced position wrt NSA spying. It just often comes across as towing the Party line.
But that's certainly no reason to call him a sockpuppet. Frankly, if you think HN is pwned so hard that the highest-karma account is a sock puppet, why would you even bother? Maybe this whole board is just one giant programmatic timesink meant to waste your time and discourage you from doing something.
> * Maybe this whole board is just one giant programmatic timesink meant to waste your time and discourage you from doing something.*
As a kid I read a science-fiction short story to that effect --- a successful scientist discovers that he's being drawn into more and more university-committee work, etc., and thus has less and less time for his real work. He detects signs that "someone" (aliens?) is doing this intentionally, to all kinds of knowledge workers. Wish I could remember the title and author.
