I didn't think the question was so bad ... but the guess of cronyism is only one of half a dozen you could pick. As part of that list, it is in fact a possibility but to immediately jump to only that was a bit of a slight.

I'm also interested in the other half of the question - what made the MIT selection committee willing to promote an uncredentialed candidate - that's a gutsy move in a university environment as faculty are very protective of the status of their group.

If someone is talented enough, schools will bend the rules on credentials. You can't do it "on the way up", you have to be "already there." I suspect that a school out there would be willing to triple his salary, and Mr. Ito could walk with faculty and corporate contracts and rebuild the Media Lab somewhere else. This is a small price to pay to keep him.

This is perhaps also made a little easier based on the field. In the arts, faculty members do get by without Phds a little more often than in science. Sometimes an MFA is enough.

If he had written it in the same spirit as your excellent comment, of course it wouldn't have been a problem. Indeed you've done a fine job of turning it into something interesting (but note that you did it by depersonalizing).

But what he actually posted was a snarky drive-by smear. This doesn't strike me as a difficult distinction.

I wasn't faulting your reaction ... but I was looking for the best in his/her question rather than assuming it was a baseless attack. I like to play devil's advocate but even without personal attacks, that can be dangerous around here. When your handle is "untilHellbanned" people might perceive you to be trolling by default.

Did he edit his comment? Questioning something, however misguided, is not an ad hominem.

A genuine question would have been phrased neutrally, but that one was dripping with insinuation ("what kind of talent", "this guy", "seems like cronyism").

Snark posing as a question is toxic. Considering how easy it is to avoid when one wants to, I think it's reasonable to hold HN users to a higher standard on this.

The hand at matter is whether it was a personal attack or not, which it wasn't. It's OK to question someone's credentials; nobody is beyond scrutiny. It's not OK to attack his person in order to do so. (E.g. "how can this liberal/short/japanese/cat-loving guy have earned this position").

No I didn't edit my comment. It's still exactly as I first wrote it.

While I'm too old to care about your knee-jerk threat, I think you better be careful about policing HN like this. It is really off-putting and IMHO creates more of an existential threat to HN than my very reasonable inquiry.

There is nothing personal about my question. As I see it, this guy has questionable credentials to get such a prestigious job, so I ask what has he done. It looks he owned a bar, made some investments, his dad was high up in a quasi-impressive tech company. Again, very vague credentials which say he has money but no particular skill.

> There is nothing personal about my question. As I see it, this guy has questionable credentials to get such a prestigious job, so I ask what has he done.

If that's all you did, I would say that's not a personal attack. But how is saying "looks like cronyism to me" not a personal attack?

Well it's possible that he is a talentless fool that got his position through family connections. It's probably more likely that he is genuinely top of the game, but just doesn't spend much time building his public profile. That's a good and all too rare thing.

Wow, untilHellbanned, I was actually on your side in this strange thread.

Until you mentioned your 12 y.o. nephew.

You may have just set a new Hacker News record, moving up Paul Graham's Disagreement Hierarchy from DH0. (Name Calling) all the way up to DH4. (Counterargument) in just 2 replies!

http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html