[ecoquant]

"Harmful" has really become a ridiculous word in my lifetime.

In Fortune's Formula by William Poundstone it mentions how MIT professor/Black Jack card counting/Hedge Fund manager Edward O. Thorp spent a period as a kid building pipe bombs and various chemical explosives for fun.

That is what I could consider a harmful activity.

To pretend ASCII art can be harmful strikes me as the thoughts of someone with paranoid delusions. Someone completely detached from reality that probably needs medication.

[andy99]

It goes along with "safety". The point is that something becomes important and is agreed upon as worth attention so then suddenly people adopt that terminology to push their agenda through. See also bullying, human rights, etc.

[andsoitis]

> is agreed upon as worth attention

That’s just it. There are many things that some group of people will say is harmful, but that many or even most others think is hyperbole.

[swozey]

You post literally the most ignorant and hilarious comments I've ever read on HN. I'm glad you're shadowbanned, but it's unfortunate you're completely oblivious to that fact and keep commenting hour after hour with drivel that nobody reads.

It also makes me confused as to why only some of your comments are dead flagged but not all. I guess I understand the HN shadowban less than I thought I did.

The entire world is better hearing your opinion of the word "harmful" though, where would we be without your opinion?!

You have such gems as "HTML Monkeys" - if there is any ageism in this industry it's caused by miserable old men like you who absolutely nobody wants to work with. It's absolutely fitting that your knowledge seems to only contain "Perl" and "C." Welcome to 2024, and I know full well you're not a kernel dev, because I am, and we wouldn't use C and Perl in the same sentence.

You're the equivalent to me of my ignorant, dead, racist grandfather going on Facebook and ranting about Jews or Muslims except replace that ignorance with your technology skillset. That's how important your commenting is to probably a majority of HN users who actually work in high end technology in 2024. Enjoy your $85k Perl job while we make $350k writing rust and go and being "basic programmers who don't know programming" because we started writing HTML for our myspace pages at 12 which was evidently beneath you. And now we're launching rockets and building distributed systems when you.. what, made a static web forum in Perl that probably had absolutely no security considerations, was single-threaded (LOL) and absolutely did not autoscale or self-repair?

You can grow old and not become a miserable, rude, depressing old man. It's possible. Also, keep your skills up to date. Nobody, literally nobody talks about perl aside from $35k/yr Russian devs in 2024. I'm 40. I'm not 20. I've been in tech since I was 10. You don't know more than everyone else here because you're old. We were there too - we were just 12, not 30.

And stop using the term "HTML Monkey" for fucks sake. It's incredibly derogatory. You probably use "cable monkey" and a bunch of other "monkey" names. They are all derogatory.

Be a better person.

https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=39627175