What the heck is going on with people on this site (or the internet in general) speaking with absolutely complete confidence in something while also being completely factually wrong?
It used to be that some minor point might be wrong; now it's the entire comment! Premise, conclusion, everything!
Have we gotten this lazy and this overconfident that we think sounding confident is enough? That if we thought it up, it must be true? In a technical discussion? REALLY?!
...I don't want to live on this plane of existence anymore.
Please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN. If another comment is wrong, the thing to do is respond respectfully with correct information. Then everybody can learn something. Please don't respond by fulminating about the community. HN is an internet forum and the internet is replete with people speaking confidently about things they don't know about I'm not saying that was true of the GP but it's certainly true in general—and frankly that's just human nature.
The comment you refer to seems like it was posted by a machine, or at least a troll. Note it is very generic and could be inserted into ANY discussion-thread. And cleverly it claims to criticize "over confidence" when in fact it itself tries to get its point across by being forcefully confident about its own righteousness. That is an old rhetorical trick accusing others of something you are doing to take the focus away from your own issues. Reminds me of some politicians
I'm not a troll, or a machine, thank you very much.
At this point I can't edit the comment in question, but every assumption in the comment it was a reply to was wrong. Every single one.
Aliases in powershell are not turned off by default. Aliases either exist or they don't. When speaking of aliases alone, bash is no simpler nor more complex than powershell.
By the way, this comment (the one I am writing right now) is ALSO replying to a comment written by someone who appears to be overconfident and under-informed. It's a freaking malady, and people are somehow proud of their incorrect blind guesswork.
Incorrect, blind guesswork gets a pass, because the statements made sound correct to a layman, and sound objections don't get a pass. I understand, now. I wasn't clear on how important facts are in a technical discussion.
I stated no facts in my earlier comment, that's true, but neither did the person I was replying to. I thought my point was clear. It was less clear than the comment based on false assumption, I guess.
Your two comments in this thread contain one fine, substantive statement: "Aliases in powershell are not turned off by default. Aliases either exist or they don't. When speaking of aliases alone, bash is no simpler nor more complex than powershell." If you had simply replied upthread with that in the fist place, it would have made a fine comment with a very high signal/noise ratio. Unfortunately the rest of both comments is just noise, tanking the ratio.
As I explained upthread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25862312), the internet is crazy-making this way, but it's not some property specific to HN and it's not something that's somehow changed lately. It's intrinsic to the medium, and we all need to build our skills in coping with it—which includes not reacting from a provoked place. That's not easy, but it's necessary to the sort of community we're trying for here, and we need everyone to work together on that.
Don't give up don't give up. It's just that if you think about it your original comment is written in a way that it could be injected into most any discussion-thread on social media as is, and therefore I found it quite amazing in its construction :-)
How is my comment wrong? I said `if the short version is not enabled by default..` which suggests that I do not think they are but am not 100% sure. Ok, I was wrong and rest of my critic doesn't apply but how is this suddenly translate to `I don't want to live on this plane of existence anymore.`? I was just wrong in assuming that aliases were user defined like on most shells.
It used to be that some minor point might be wrong; now it's the entire comment! Premise, conclusion, everything!
Have we gotten this lazy and this overconfident that we think sounding confident is enough? That if we thought it up, it must be true? In a technical discussion? REALLY?!
...I don't want to live on this plane of existence anymore.