Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
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In the case of TFA: The airships as proposed solve none of the problems the author claims unless they just bypass customs and border control, which is, you know, a crime. And if your startup is hinged on the idea of committing nation-tier crimes at scale to succeed, that doesn't merit rebuttal. It merits mockery.
Hence why I mentioned the Satoshi, because that's also really funny, for similar reasons: because people who get really good at one complicated thing, in our cases here, programming; suddenly think that everything else is less complicated, and therefore easily handled "in the roadmap" and they go out and make fools of themselves for not doing literally a few minutes of solid research beforehand.
That said I will absolutely cop to the downvote comment. My bad there.
Incorrect. The HN guidelines repeatedly emphasize that HN is for thoughtful discussion and intellectual curiosity, and not for sneering, being snarky, flamebaiting, going on generic tangents, internet tropes, or political or ideological battle.
And, these aren't arbitrary - there's a reason for them. Those negative behaviors degrade discourse. The main reason why HN has managed to remain a semi-civilized place to be (as opposed to Reddit and Twitter) after two-ish decades of existence and significant user growth is because of those guidelines and dang's impartial commitment to implementing them.
Your comment 41849098 above breaks a frankly impressive amount of the guidelines and anyone who even does a cursory read-over of them (they're conveniently copy-pasted above) can see that.
> In my mind at least, that's perfectly fine to make fun of, because it's funny.
Well, then don't do it on HN. Sneering about "crypto losers" and sarcastically saying "The only prayer I say on the regular is "Lord, bless me with the confidence of a mediocre tech bro."" does not gratify intellectual curiosity, breaks the guidelines, is completely value-less fluff, and negatively contributes to the discourse and quality of HN. If you want to do that - do it on Twitter.