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Comment by Goladus | Hacker News Reader

The first post was killed for some unknown reason. Are Kawasaki articles banned from Hacker News?

Also, the ad hominem seems out of place. Is he wrong or uninteresting in this case?

I think the first post may have been deleted because it had "[good!]" in the title and got flagged. It would have been easier to remove the "[good!]", but it's likely that it got killed automatically before an admin could edit it.

Is there a way to find out whether a story was killed (besides noticing a sudden drop in the ranking)?

In this case, the only way I know is that I had the comments page of the old thread loaded. When I refreshed the page, [dead] appeared in the title and replying was disabled. Now, I'm unable to find it, so I'm not sure, and the comments that were there are not here.

Ah! HN doesn't display [dead] when you're the submitter of the story. Now I only wonder _why_ it was killed ...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3088810

It would be ad hominem if I were trying to prove the claims of this article incorrect by critiquing him personally, but I clearly wasn't trying to disprove the claims of the article.

Citing wikipedia: "Gratuitous verbal abuse or "name-calling" itself is not an ad hominem or a logical fallacy.[8][13][14][15][16] In order to become a fallacy, the insult would need to be given as a reason for believing some conclusion. An example would be, "X is idiotically ignorant [of politics], so why should we listen to him now?""

Also, "Is he wrong or uninteresting in this case?" is a false dilemma.

You are correct. Absent any attempt to address points actually made, it cannot be ad hominem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com