It is absurd that my repeated, informed rebuttals of this rudely-phrased nonsensical misinformation are being flagged, so that visitors to the site will see only the aggressive misinformation and not the corrections. What kind of site are these people trying to turn this into?

This is not just a "poor me, I am being persecuted" issue. We can let Hacker News turn into Twitter, with insult contests being resolved by flagging campaigns that eventually hellban the accounts of the less-popular side of any issue, or into YouTube, dominated by conspiracy theories and hate; or we can stand up for reasoned discussion and informed comment.

Comparing svat's reply and yours, seems like the community filter works quite well.

Svat's reply is of course excellent and highly commendable, but they did not post it until after I posted my cri de cœur above. The thread consisted of [svat's reasonable comment], [my reasonable reply], [svat's reasonable reply], [troll post with reckless disregard for the truth], [flagged], [flagged], where the [flagged] posts were the ones where I was correcting the misinformation.

Also, note that the person who posted the misinformation never bothered to thank svat for their careful and courteous correction and their meticulous attempt to try to DWIM the troll comment into something that made some amount of sense. This makes more sense on the assumption that they were trolling than on the assumption that they were merely misinformed — someone who was interested in the truth would surely have offered thanks for such a helpful and polite correction. Instead, it seems clear that they were only posting here to make trouble and waste the time of reasonable, knowledgeable people like svat — particularly in light of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22424205.

I had already come to that conclusion because the comment was clearly based on a set of misconceptions about what TeX and LaTeX are, and how they relate to each other, which could have been corrected by reading the introductory paragraphs of the Wikipedia article for either TeX or LaTeX. If someone isn't investing even that level of care in their comments, they don't care whether they're talking nonsense or not.

We can see that the same account continues to post aggressive comments rudely attacking other users, although since I'm not familiar with the areas they're talking about, I can't tell if they're employing the same reckless disregard for the truth in these cases: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22501626 "I don't see the point of your post, and frankly sounds like nitpicking."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22499637 "Don't you understand where and why are there abstractions? ... having people [referring to the person he's replying to] naively complain"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22458752 "You may quote simplistic cliches"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22459638 "Your comment is unrealistic and even absurd"

Maybe you think this is the kind of dialogue we should be encouraging on here, but I don't. I think that in addition to setting an example of better behavior, as svat did, we should explicitly call out such misbehavior and explain why it isn't desirable, as I did.

Of course that's the case, but thankfully we have you, kragen, to thank for your work in accusing others of being ignorant and clueless while knowing nothing at all about anyone or anything, and adding nothing of value to the discussion in the process.

And how would you do that? You haven’t said anything of substance to refute GP’s statements.

In cases of aggressive trolling like those statements, I think it's sufficient to point out that they're obviously wrong and assume that people will then check Wikipedia before relying on them. That doesn't work if my contradiction gets flagged, however.

Just to clarify:

> TeX is used because it's a convenient interface between higher level descriptions…

I think you mean LaTeX, not TeX. (LaTeX is a macro layer on top of TeX that provides these convenient interfaces, while TeX is a low-level typesetter.)

> Additionally, TeX is used rarely by humans…

This sounds a bit contradictory with the previous statement, but maybe you mean that TeX is rarely used directly by many people (without LaTeX or some other macro layer). In any case, the LaTeX macros are implemented in TeX, so the TeX program is always the one being used (which I think was the point of the poster you're replying to).

> And how many TeX and LaTeX reimplementation a are there?

I didn't understand the meaning or point of this, as the answer is either "very few" or "many" depending on what you're counting. Extensions of the TeX program include eTeX, pdfTeX, XeTeX and LuaTeX, not to mention a few others like pTeX and upTeX. (Confusingly, when we say “TeX” we often mean one of these programs as well, as a lot of their code comes from TeX—they are written/implemented as patches (changefiles).) Reimplementations of a small part of the TeX/LaTeX syntax for mathematical expressions (only) include MathJax and KaTeX. Are these a lot, or hardly any (would have expected a lot more)? Depends on your perspective I guess.

Thank you!

It's probably worth pointing out that nobody uses TeX bare without a LaTeX-like macro library. Knuth wrote his books with a macro library confusingly called "plain TeX", which ships with the TeX language interpreter. (That interpreter was the subject of this thread.) LaTeX relies on the plain TeX library, just as, for example, GLib relies on the C standard library. The third alternative popular TeX macro library for document formatting, other than plain TeX and LaTeX, is a thing called ConTeXt. It seems to me that ConTeXt is less popular than LaTeX, but more popular than plain TeX.

But of course to invoke any of these you have to write code in TeX, just as to invoke Rails you have to write code in Ruby, or to invoke Numpy you have to write code in Python.

As far as reimplementations, I think the only reimplementations were done at Stanford in the late 1970s as Knuth and his students wrote a series of prototypes, culminating in the TeX language we know today in 1983.