[burgerbrain]

Speaking as somebody who enjoys intentionally mocking others (go ahead, check my comment history. Fuck, I picked this username just to make the then-popular diet discussions on HN more interesting), if he's honestly not trying it (and I have a hard time believing that, he is as far as I can tell a reasonably intelligent person and should be able to analysis himself objectively) then he is damn good at doing it by accident. Damn good.

I only wish I could convey such attitude through text intentionally.

EDIT (posted after jacobolus' reply):

When I first came here, I was annoyed at the entire HN attitude of "a better discussion board". Good clean discussion is great, but at the time it seemed too dismissive of the great conversation that happens elsewhere on the web; too arrogant if you will. Furthermore, I saw that attitude as a sort of challenge: could I game the system and be just helpful enough some of the time to allow myself to be an utter asshole the rest of the time without getting banned?

You see, somebody who is an asshole some of the time and useful the rest of the time is not a valuable community member. Even if most of the time is spent being useful that is still not a person that you want in your community; in short, the karma system is broken. Of course HN isn't quite as broken as a pure karma system would be, hellbanning still kicks in for people with positive karma, but it is broken nevertheless. It's pretty easy to keep individual comments at positive or at least neutral karma by picking your topic correctly, which gets you around (to my knowledge) all but manual banning. (I suspect an improved banning system would involve flagging people for manual inspection after they have too many comments with large amounts of up and down voting. I can't speak for the false positive rate of such a system except to say that my honest productive comments rarely seemed to swing)

But I'm done now. tptacek does a better job of what I wanted to do than I think I ever could.

I think I'm past due on closing this account anyway. I'm out; apologies for any grief I've caused. I probably owe a good number of you a beer.

[jacobolus]

I should clarify: he surely is trying to mock them sometimes, but (a) it’s a pretty friendly ribbing, and (b) the mockery isn’t the purpose, it’s just a rhetorical device. By my italicized “mock”, I meant something closer to: “he’s not trying to shame them into submission, as some kind of ‘authoritarian’ bully power play”.

Edit: maybe it’s better to say that he isn’t trolling them (i.e. intentionally riling people up just for the sake of being a jerk), but is trying to be genuinely helpful and advance the conversation, even though sometimes that takes a teasing sort of tone. Notice all the smiley faces.