All of the talk of how some people on HN totally for real knew the NSA was hacking people is irrelevant and a total distraction from the far more interesting question of why we needed a leaker to confirm it.
The article then goes on to explain why, even with hundreds of thousands of ppl doing incident response investigations, nobody caught / correctly attributed these attacks.
1. Even if you were right it doesn't matter. Coming to the comments to split semantics while obviously missing the point of the entire article is adding incredible noise. There was more than one sentence in the article and more than enough context to forgive an ambiguous or even incorrect sentence.
2. I don't agree that you're right. You state there's only one interpretation. I could just as easily interpret it as "Why didn't we see the NSA coming for our network?" or "Given all of these NSA attacks, how did no one detect them entering the network?".
So between those things I downvoted it.
I didn't 'come to the comments to split semantics', nor did I say anything at all about the rest of the article. I simply replied to an already existing discussion about the meaning of a phrase.
Describing that one short post as "incredible noise" is frankly beyond absurd, particularly when you have no problem making noisy, unnecessary complaints in two separate posts here.
> I don't agree that you're right. You state there's only one interpretation. I could just as easily interpret it as "Why didn't we see the NSA coming for our network?" or "Given all of these NSA attacks, how did no one detect them entering the network?".
I didn't say there's only one interpretation, I said there's only one meaning, with the point being that if a phrase is used that has one specific meaning then obviously some people are going to assume that is what is meant by it and comment accordingly.
Being right/accurate does matter, precisely to avoid incredible noise like this.
Thank you for replying and explaining.
Yeah, only one person needs to start the semantics-splitting topic and the rest of the lazy uninformative pseudo-discussion just flows from there, with every other guy adding one short harmless post. That’s how we get completely-derailed garbage threads like this. (Did I participate in the thread? Yes. Though in my defense I was trying to impress on people that this kind of thing should not happen.)
“Nor did I say anything at all about the rest of the article” — that should probably have tipped you off in a small way about the value of your addition.
Maybe you should learn how to scroll instead of reveling in the very thing you're complaining about, otherwise people might take you for a hypocrite who is only making matters worse.
> garbage threads like this. Did I participate in the thread? Yes.
And how was your cake?
> “Nor did I say anything at all about the rest of the article” — that should probably have tipped you off in a small way about the value of your addition.
Do you think all comments are required to address every word of an article? Maybe someone should tip you off that not everything posted here is going to be written with your personal satisfaction in mind.
>The purpose of this post isn’t to discuss the legality of the NSA's actions or the morality of the leaks, what we are trying to answer is: "Why did we never see it coming?"
They clearly made it the central theme. With enough context what they are saying makes sense, but that phrase is so often used to describe how people predicted something without evidence. I'm sure I've read several articles talking about how some health organization "saw the cornavirus pandemic coming in 200x"