When taking extreme positions or offering gambles at humor or impression, it is often impossible to know which side of the line you will fall. As they say in Hollywood, no one knows anything (about what will become a hit).
First of all, let me tell you I'm a lonely curmudgeon with no social life and about 1.5 friends. HN functions for me as a crude surrogate for socializing, in addition to its functions as a place to read about cool stuff, and yes, occasionally, a place to pop off and talk a little trash. I do try to contribute good stuff.
So understand that I'm being sincere when I say, thank you for taking the time to read through my comment history.
I also want to say that I do my best not to troll, and when I fail and people call me on it, I admit the mistake and apologize.
I was trolling you a little bit there in the other thread and I apologize.
Now then, as to leaving out the worst bits I don't think I can oblige you. In the first place, because my comments are sincere. I don't always phrase things in the nicest way, but I have a real point to make with a given comment or I would omit it. In the second place, what is the "decision algorithm" for "best" vs. "worst"? My point is, what you or I think are my best/worst comments may be totally different from what the next person thinks. I have had one comment moderated by dang once (and I was really embarrassed that he had to do it.) Other than that I pretty much stand by what I've said. There are a few comments I would delete if I could but that bird flew the coop long ago.
Consider the old saw about advertising, "Half of your ad budget is wasted, the problem is, no one can tell you which half."
That said, I take your comment to heart and I'll try to be less cranky on HN.
But I stand by the comment I made above (for example): Apologists for computer INsecurity make me sick. It's far past time to fix this mess. Related to that, the people who says "Oh I give a crap." but don't call their representative or something like that are basically part of the problem. If one person read my snarky shitty comment and made the call, it was worthwhile. As for all the people that read it and didn't pick up the phone, I want them to know they suck, just a little, because I'm mad at them. In fact, I'm mad at most people. We stand at the pinnacle of history. But everyone is busy driving and talking on their cellphones at the same time while meanwhile the Monarch Butterfly is going extinct right before our eyes! There may not be elephants in fifty years.
Okay, that's enough of that. Gotta calm down. ;-)
Now about that other thread, where I was kinda trolly, my point there was that Rational Materialist fundamentalism is still fundamentalism. I am a rational materialist. Physics is the "Word of God". Nevertheless, I have had personal experience that indicates that physics is contingent on consciousness. I'm not going to be able to offer any sort of scientific proof of that because the structure of the Universe precludes it. But it's true. It is a true statement that cannot be proven. Not even in theory.
There are hard limits to rationality, that a rational person must take account of to be rational.
Consider: you're hanging out somewhere discussing rationality, when suddenly into the room bursts a Mad Logician! He's got a bomb and he shouts, "Do something irrational right now or I'm gonna blow us all to kingdom-come!" What do you do? If you start hopping up and down on one foot that's irrational, but to do so to prevent the ML from detonating his bomb is rational! Maybe if you ignore him he'll just go away.
It's Russell's Paradox.
This sentence doesn't describe itself.
These words have no meaning.
Etc.
My quip about the square-root of two was meant to point out the fundamental nature of irrationality. Pythagoras is said to have killed the first guy to point out that two and the square-root of two are incommensurable. The "rational space" is a subset of the real space. There will always be places on the map marked, "Here be Dragons".
(Also, if you call shamans con-men be sure to make sure that none of them can hear you. ;-)
That's one for the book as well as the one about unicode and writing systems. To me the quality of a comment is something that indicates how well that comment will age over time, some comments retain their strength even years later and your unicode comment is an excellent example of one of those. It really opened my eyes and gave me some new insight into something that I had already considered dealt with years ago. So thank you very much for that.
Here's to many more long-enduring quality comments.
(It blew me away when I realized that computer text isn't writing! English is so well served by ASCII, and has been since so early on, that the assumption that bytes are the same as writing just gets lodged in there, unexamined.)
Everyone else, call your representative.
You know how people say, "Pictures or it didn't happen?"
Call your representatives and tell them what you think, or it might as well have never happened.