Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49330742. Thanks!
3,692 karma · joined October 30, 2007
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Please send HN questions to hn@ycombinator.com.
It’s true that this comment alone was not sufficient for a ban; as I explained in my comment, it’s the pattern of comments, particularly in recent days, continuing a pattern over years that we’ve posted several warnings about. And it's the fact that other users who have a solid track record of contributing positively to HN are being driven away by that style of rhetoric from this user, or at least signaling that these comments were beyond the pale.
Our role here is to make HN a place where reasonable people feel they can have intellectually gratifying discussions that are of higher quality than elsewhere online. When we see signs that good contributors are being driven away by an escalating pattern of toxic comments from a user who has been warned many times over a decade, it would be negligent of us not to act.
As we say all the time, we don’t see every guidelines breach, or reply every time we do; there are over 10,000 comments posted each day and only two of us. But when we see an ongoing pattern of abuse, we always issue warnings, then ban the account if it continues. You’re always welcome to email us (hn@ycombinator.com) when you see anything egregious, or at least just flag the comment. That's what people do when they wholeheartedly support moderation.
The community has developed an immune response to people just trying to get attention for their own work without first contributing to the community or demonstrating credibility. Since about December 2025 there's been a huge spike in the number of people posting Show HN projects, because coding agents have made it so much easier to build things, and a lot of people are finding it exhausting.
If you want to get your work seen on HN, take some time to establish yourself as a good community member who submits interesting articles from different sources about a variety of topics, and makes insightful comments about different topics. When you post your Show HN project, include an intro post that tells the whole story of why you built it, what challenges you overcame and what you learned.
> You can separate Cook is a garbage person
We've banned this account.
We've asked you politely, several times over the years to observe the guidelines. In recent times you've been acting more than ever like they don't apply to you. They do apply to you just as they apply to everyone and it's time we made that clear.
In this case, someone has raised the notion that sometimes someone can hold two legitimate positions that are contradictory, which, as the original commenter mentioned, is attributable to F. Scott Fitzgerald but has been noted in different ways by many reputable philosophers and scholars through history. In your reply, you've effectively sneered at anyone who wrestles with such contradictions, including the parent commenter, then gone on to use the term “garbage person” for another human.
Other terms you've used in past months include:
most humans are dumber than a box of rocks
literally not figuratively the 1930s Nazis
fools
idiots
morons
cretins
It's always a challenge for us to fairly moderate political discussions on HN. We want people to be able to discuss important, difficult topics and ideally to work together to develop ways of making the world better. HN is a place for builders, and that can and should include building solutions for the difficult problems the world faces, or at least talking about how we could. Identifying and critiquing flaws in the ideas and actions of one's political or intellectual opponents is fine and healthy.
Continually demeaning individuals or groups with dehumanizing or contemptuous epithets and caricatured characterizations makes this place toxic and drives away people who come here with the expectation of having intellectually gratifying discussions with reasonable people.
When people continue to break the guidelines, even after several appeals from moderators, we have to assume they have no intention to use the site as intended and in fact want to be banned. If that's not the case, you can email us at hn@ycombinator.com to discuss how you can demonstrate that.
We updated the primary submission's URL with the blog post URL from this one, and made the API doc a secondary link in the thread header.
When similar URLs or different versions of the same story are submitted and get votes/comments, we have to use discretion to work out which URL is best, who submitted first, which discussion is most active/healthy, and we'll try to consolidate the discussion into one thread with the most informative/canonical URL as the main link.