HackerNews off course discussions

A week and a half ago I found fraudulent transactions on my credit card. Linode was the only place where I used it, and with the recent incident they had I naturally assumed it was stolen from them. I called my card company and canceled it immediately. Then I wrote a post on hackernews urging people to cancel the cards. For some reason not everyone was happy with that.

The message was simple. We all know linode was compromised and it doesn't matter if they stored credit cards in plain text or used some very secure technique. Since we will never know for sure how much data the hackers got, it is a good idea to assume they got it all. Now I'm in no way complaining about linode, they took the appropriate steps to resolve the issue and added a two factor authentication. And because the FBI was involved they couldn't just disclose any information.

On hackernews the discussion derailed into something else. Some people talked about how the linode staff is incompetent when it comes to security, some called me a fraud, some went into a completely different tangent. Now if you go on the thread you will not know what the problem was and the good advices that were given because the useful comments are all in the bottom. All I wanted is to warn people people.

This happens every time a post makes it to the home page. You get a few relevant comments and then some people who are there for the sole purpose of confusion accuse you or starting a flame war and they start a flame war and the quality of the post goes south.

Discourse is designed just for that, maybe Paul Graham should find a way to squeeze it somewhere in hackernews.