Yes. I'm saying you've gone out of the way to distort the truth. Exhibit A: your second "fact": not a fact. What the site is actually doing is right there in the link the guy who runs the site showed you.
You have options available to you besides seething about this and leaving the site.
Curiosity: what's your Pinboard account name? Mine's the same as my HN name.
From the blogpost: "The data we will examine will include private bookmarks, which make up about half of all Pinboard bookmarks."
It's not a direct quote since I'm on mobile, because I had to get out of the house and go for a walk after one of my heroes called me a liar. But it's factually accurate. What part isn't?
I'd like an answer to this question: Would you hire a liar? Someone you believe would go out of their way to be deliberately untruthful? Rather than even try to figure out if there was some sort of misunderstanding, you went straight for calling me a liar. You, of all people.
I am not seething. I'm quite hurt.
Also, the fact that half of all Pinboard links are marked 'private' should give some indication that people commonly use Pinboard as a repository for links they don't want to associate with themselves publicly. That's what we're paying for.
To run the experiment, I am going to be drawing a few thousand links at random from the entire pool of Pinboard bookmarks. This will include private bookmarks, which make up about half the Pinboard collection.
He intentionally created a program to trawl through data which was explicitly marked by users as private.
And here's what you wrote earlier:
you'd specifically and intentionally create a program whose sole purpose was to analyze private user data and report on the results.
He did no such thing.
Perhaps, instead of directing all your energy into maximizing the feels you generate from being called on something, you could instead introspect and re-evaluate and consider that maybe you said something very wrong. People do that all the time. They do not ritually kill their accounts when that happens. The older, wiser ones are likely to just acknowledge it and apologize. Some of the somewhat younger, dumber ones, like me, have done that too.
We are both crudding the thread up now, so I'm going to stop posting about this.
You have options available to you besides seething about this and leaving the site.
Curiosity: what's your Pinboard account name? Mine's the same as my HN name.