Thanks - we'll put that in the toptext as well.
43,720 karma · joined August 18, 2007
Marion Milner, 'The Toleration of Conflict', Occupational Psychology, 17, 1, January 1943
---
Please send HN questions to hn@ycombinator.com.
These things are against HN's guidelines, and you've unfortunately been doing them repeatedly. This is not what HN is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
People are upvoting this submission because it's obviously a cool project. Yes, we ask commenters and submitters to hand-write the text they post to HN, and yes, Show HNs with genai writeups mostly aren't that interesting. Occasionally, however, one is cool, fun, and creative. HN is better off with these, even though few of us want to read generated text.
I actually emailed the submitter this morning, asking them to replace that text with something handwritten. We do that all the time, trying to salvage cool projects from getting flagged (either by the software or by users). In this case I never heard back—presumably the email didn't get through.
I decided that the text wasn't so bad and moved it to the top and re-upped the post anyway. Perhaps that was a mistake—but if I hadn't, this post would probably never have gotten attention. Given how enthusiastic the community response has been (and no, it is not a voting ring), that would have been a loss for the site.
Society is in a complicated process of figuring out the best ways to use AI. It's not clear what the conventions will end up being. Many people have many takes. Some of them break HN's rules—but often they haven't the foggiest idea there even is such a rule.
How about we don't assume deceptive intentions or seek to send others to hell during what is obviously an entirely-in-flux situation which will probably be going on for years?
Edit: please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50434775 as well because you're breaking the site guidelines in many places at the moment, and that is not cool.
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2025-11-08
or, for that matter, one month?
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2026-10-08
Similar perceptions have been around since before Hacker News was even named Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13852).
Livenerf: Has Opus 5.5 been nerfed yet? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49901736 - Sept 2026 (394 comments)
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
(Of course it's fine to use AI tools! We use them heavily ourselves. Just please don't use them to generate or edit text to be read by fellow humans on Hacker News.)
It's impossible to know for sure what was LLM generated or edited, but we have to rely on imperfect classifiers or else the site would be completely flooded by genai text, which is not what the community here wants to read, nor in the intended spirit of HN.
Edit: ok, I've attempted to remove the dupes now. In a few cases the same user posted comments about what appear to be different projects, and those ones I left.
This is in both https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
Will merge the others.
Edit: ok, that's done and I did my best to normalize the timestamps for the posts from the older threads, but it's a bit messy. If you see weird things that's why.
Where was that? This doesn't sound right. I was running HN 10 years ago, and it has never been a practice to ban people for "comments about PG".
We ban accounts that repeatedly break the site guidelines, including with personal attacks, but that is not a question of who the person is—it's a question of how badly they've broken the rules.
Also, if the person is connected to YC, that would make us a little less likely to ban them, by the principle described here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....
When knowledgeable people show up to address concerns on HN, that's good for all of us. We don't need you to like or agree with what they say, but we do need you to follow HN's guidelines.
Threads like this can easily turn into mob dynamics—it has happened before—and when they do, that's bad for all of us.
It's easy for generic criticisms to pop up first in a thread because they come to mind so quickly. It takes little effort to fire them off or to put down someone else's work.
In this case you led with your feelings about social issues. Those are important, but in a thread like this, they are a bummer—doubly so when there hasn't yet been time for interesting (and interested!) comments to appear. What incentive do people have to share anything if they get scolded and told that society ought not to tolerate this?
That's why I'm replying at such length; probably too intensely, sorry! I don't intend any of it personally—I just know how sensitive to initial conditions HN threads are.
A project like this doesn't need a privacy policy or a data policy, and it doesn't need to address social problems. If we start imposing bureaucratic checklists and social burdens on little projects, that will smother them and kill the fun.
If and when it turns into Facebook, legal teams will do the needful. In the meantime let's use HN to respond to people's projects in the intended spirit: fun, curious, creative.
It's true that your account is not the only one breaking the site guidelines, but that doesn't make it ok for you* to do so. Pointing the finger at others doesn't help.
(* I don't mean you personally, of course, but any of us)
It's true that we don't moderate in every case where the guidelines are broken, but that's for the simple reason that we don't see everything that gets posted—not even close—and we can't moderate what we don't see. It is not because we're secretly agreeing with one side more than the other, though it's common for politically passionate users to jump to that conclusion (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
> Either ban all political comments or none
That's not how HN works. There's a long body of experience and many past explanations about how it does work: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....
If you want to familiarize yourself with that material and then have still a question that hasn't been answered yet, I'd be happy to take a crack at it. But since all the obvious objections, such as the one you raise here, have been answered many times over many years, I think it's fair to ask people to read some of those answers first.
I've now attempted to address all the points you've raised, so I'd like to add one of my own: I believe we've banned you before, and if you keep violating both HN's rules and its intended spirit, we're going to ban you again. If you'd please take the spirit of the site more to heart and fix this so we don't have to ban you, that would be better.
Five Memorable Books About Programming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3917165 - May 2012 (1 comment)
Five Memorable Books About Programming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=128054 - March 2008 (14 comments)
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.