In the future, remember this when you decide to dissect someone's writing.
Quoting entire paragraphs may not be sufficient to provide proper context, and especially if being willfully misinterpreted, can be potentially harmful.
But well intentioned quotes, immediately under a post providing them in their full context - which is the case in my post you replied to? I'm hard pressed to see that as distorting your meaning and harming discourse. If you have specific grievances as to how I have, please state them. If my understanding is distorted, there is harm to discourse regardless of whether or not it's visible in the form of distorted quotes.
The many questions I'm asking are my attempts at understanding the context of your statements, to avoid such distortions. The couple that you've answered have clarified some things. A couple more have been mooted by indirect responses. Many others are still relevant and unanswered.
Even now, I'm a bit unsure if you're saying that I've done harm, in the specific post I made that you were responding to - or if you're making vague generalizations again, this time about sentence level quoting on the internet in general. I'm assuming the former for now - but please correct me if I'm wrong. I would ask, but that's clearly not working out for me.
You may want to lead with that next time - I'm not the only one attempting to interpret your vagueness in-context (that is, in the specific case as presented here) which apparently isn't your intent. Hopefully it'll generate productive discussion instead of a confused chorus attempting to clarify terminology.
> I feel there's a panicked "deer in the headlights" attitude that comes with talking about data and metadata
Are you seeing that in this thread? Or is this more of a generalized feeling of HN? Or of the internet?
I feel like I'm mostly seeing discussions about what specific data was involved, what alternatives are out there, and the severity and history of the problem (which I'm seeing as mostly "not as severe as your initial kneejerk to the title might imply, but not ideal either" - pretty levelheaded and accurate, IMO?)
None of them seemed particularly frozen, unable to move forwards, or panicking beyond the time it took them to evaluate what specific (meta)data was leaking - to me, at least. And given that password databases secure the keys to the castle, so to speak, I'm not sure a little panicking isn't warranted in this specific context.
> I regularly forget about how closed-minded the HN userbase is when it comes to privacy.
If that's in response to this thread, keep in mind that, in-context, the "privacy" many professionals in here are concerned about, is the "privacy" of their amazon account keys, to avoid their servers being subverted into part of a malware distribution botnet. And the "privacy" of their user database - to avoid the reputation hit that comes when all your customer's passwords are cracked, and their inboxes are flooded with porn spam. I think it'd be a mistake to overgeneralize that response.