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pinkmuffinereyesterday at 5:52 PM0 repliesview on HN

I want to be as polite as possible, but explain the confusion that timerol was experiencing, just in case it was unclear. Because the article's focus is about the oldest "sophisticated drilling tool", and your comment said "Indian carpenters always had ...", the implication is that you're disagreeing with the article being discussed. The information you share is interesting, but it's slightly off topic from the main point of discussion (ie, the age of sophisticated tooling). You can avoid confusion like this by explicitly acknowledging when you're going to go off-topic. Eg, you could say "Not related to the age of the tool, but I saw similar tools used in India -- Indian carpenters always had..." I hope that explanation is polite and maybe helpful :). Apologies if I over-explained.

Somewhat relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle