tomhow

It wasn't heavily flagged. It was pulled down by the flamewar detector due to the large number of comments, and it slid under the radar due to only hitting the front page during overnight hours on Friday night/Saturday morning. It still spent 10 hours on the front page, but all during off peak hours. I've now created a new copy of the post so it can have prime time exposure.

The guidelines ask:

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Many people from all sections of HN, the tech industry and broader society have been surprised and wrong in all directions about how the emergence of AI is playing out. I certainly have. I can't think of a single person whose predictions have been precisely accurate. So, please don't use terms like “wall of shame” and “cope”. It doesn't help anyone make better predictions and only makes you, and HN generally, seem mean.

> It seems like you’re more concerned about keeping threads from years ago coherent than you are about my wishes and safety.

This is obviously not true. We care about thread persistence and coherence as a default, because some of HN's most historically significant threads are from the earliest years. We will take reasonable steps to protect people's identity and safety once we know the specifics of the situation. We routinely redact URLs, company names, project names and other identifying details from historical comments to prevent people's identity from being inferred.

We go to great effort to find the right balance between a user's need for privacy and the community/public benefit in keeping threads intact and coherent (moving every one of a user's comments to a different username makes the threads incoherent).

On a case-by-case basis we can move a selection of comments to a separate username. We of course don't want anyone to be in danger.

My email is the same as Dan's. hn@ycombinator.com. Yes you can forward it and I'll read it straight away.

We can't necessarily do the exact things you've asked, because it makes all the discussion threads you participated in incoherent. We can take reasonable steps to disassociate personally-identifying comments from others.

> Please help. Death threats are not fun, especially when you have a 2 year old daughter. There is a 100+ page forum thread of people betting on when I (real name, real person) am going to die. Just saying that somewhat Doxxes me.

This sounds terrible, and of course we don't want anything like that for you. It's just not clear (and I still haven't received an email from you so I can't look into the details of the case) how the actions you're specifying that we need to take on HN will fix this issue on some other website. I don't know any details other than the limited information you're sharing here. I can't find any emails about this matter linked to the username you're commenting from here.

GDPR doesn't require that a participant on a discussion forum be able to erase their entire history. Article 17(3) covers this. It is reasonable for a user to ask that their posts be anonymized.

> dang told me “tough luck”

He (nor I) would never write that or anything like it. What we always say is that we aim to find a compromise between a user's wish for their entire history to be erased and the rest of the community's expectation that when they participate in discussion threads, those threads will persist unadulterated into the future.

We are always willing to redact PII and do other things to prevent people's real identities from being recognized from their HN activity. We help people with requests like this all the time.

Edit:

Now I can see the email in question, I can confirm that dang did not write “tough luck”. We were, and still are, happy to work with this user to redact material that reveals their identity or location from their old comments.

We are never rude or obstinate like this. We will always do whatever we can to protect people's privacy, which we do by redacting PII and moving posts to anonymized accounts.

We take users' privacy seriously and have had a consistent policy for years. If anyone is worried about personally identifying information, we're always happy to redact the PII and reassign comments/posts to an anonymous account. The only thing we don't do is wholesale wipe someone's entire history from HN, because it guts the threads and ruins them for everyone else who participated and who might find them interesting to read in the future.

We've banned this account. Please don't post AI-generated text or combative, fulminatory comments here. People who have something substantive to contribute can do so in the spirit of curious conversation, which is what HN is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don't post ideological flamebait on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Ok fair enough. I think it was late at night when I saw that and my sarcasm radar was shutting down. But it’s best to avoid sarcasm here because it’s usually snarky and we always want to avoid snark, even if the comment you’re replying to is snarky (which it was in this case). We really want to avoid circling the drain with this kind of discourse.

We’ve banned this account. This isn’t the place for you, thanks.

My opening comment politely asked you to “use less inflammatory language”. My characterizations have been of your conduct not your self. If you had anything of substance to say you wouldn’t keep fixating on where I live. As I’ve said, if you want a website where it’s fine to say someone “deserves a bullet in the head”, go somewhere else. This isn’t the place for you.

And from others we keep hearing that HN is too anti-AI. Of course neither is completely true. HN is a big community representing a spectrum of views. Few people are zealots in either direction. Most have moderate views that recognize the pros and cons, to varying degrees. No community as large as HN is ever unanimously pro or anti anything.

Please don't sneer at groups/categories of people like this. Even if it was true (obviously it isn't; many in the software industry have been laid off in recent years), it's still unkind and inflammatory. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don't post like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don't reply to a bad comment with another bad comment. Personal attacks are never ok here. You could easily respond by engaging with the substance of their comment rather than ad hominem. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This is an unhinged ad hominem attack and none of it changes whether the original comment breached the guidelines.

Idealizing killing of people is never okay on HN and we've been consistent about that for as long as I can remember.

Even if your ad hom attack was relevant: where my LinkedIn says I am based says nothing about how many people my “tax dollars have killed” or what I personally support. Digging up limited available public information about someone then making these kinds of assumptions, extrapolations and value-judgments about their level of wealth, career/life decisions and options, and political views is utterly vile. Don't ever do this again on HN; if you did this kind of thing to anyone who wasn't a moderator, the account would be immediately banned.

The facts available in the linked story indicate that there were failures at every level in the system: two teams of investigators, the prosecutors, the defense and the judge. If you have a substantive argument about how to address this kind of failure, you can make it in accordance with the guidelines.

The guidelines exist entirely so that substantive arguments can have the very best chance of being expressed and heard. Trawling through someone's limited online footprint to handwave up a whole lot of irrelevant material only indicates you don't have a strong point to make. Everyone knows that ad hominem is what you do when you don't have a strong argument to rely on, and this is about as bad as ad hom ever gets.

If your style of discourse is to declare that another human “deserves a bullet in the head”, this is not the place for you. My goodness.

We're talking about it all the time :) My comment above doesn't contradict the email. I didn't say we're not wanting/planning to do anything about it, just that there's more to it than plugging in Pangram. If Substack is being more proactive about it on their own site, that's great. It would make life easier for all of us if all the major content platforms cleaned up their own sites. We're already proactive about detecting/autokilling genai comments posted to our own site. It's detecting genai content on 3rd party sites that introduces more complications.

In the meantime, please feel free to flag items that are badly written/unpleasant to read, and email us if something is on the front page that shouldn't be there.

It's one thing for us to detect and autokill generated comments on our own site; it's our site and we can set the rules and run software on our own servers to process the comments and handle things in the way we and the community are happy with.

It's a big additional leap to for our software to try to reach into others' sites, get through any anti-bot defenses they may be running, try to scrape their content and evaluate on whether it's sufficiently human-authored to be on HN.

There's generally a wider range of LLM involvement with a long-form post than the typical, relatively brief HN comment, which then opens the way for more debate on HN about "how much" LLM influence the post has and how much should be allowed on HN. Part of what we're trying to optimize for on HN is minimizing offtopic/meta discussion, so we don't want to encourage this kind of debate.

Our heuristic about article quality is largely unchanged from before LLMs were an issue: if an article is badly written, it shouldn't be on HN, and should be flagged.

Previously...

How to think about software quality (2022) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39490543 - Feb 2024 (66 comments)

We've re-upped that thread and moved relevant comments to it, thanks!

Please don’t make assumptions about where I’m a citizen, voter or resident. Even if you're right it’s irrelevant.

The guidelines require us to converse curiously, to be kind, and to avoid ideological battle and flamebait. To write “A judge making a “mistake” like this deserves a bullet in the head, nothing less” is obviously in breach of all those expectations.

If you want to mount a case for ways judges and other actors in the legal system should be held accountable for errors that lead to illegitimate convictions, sure, you can do so thoughtfully. This isn’t difficult.

Comments moved thither. Thanks!

Seen here once or twice before... :)

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44697007 - July 2025 (102 comments)

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39001755 - Jan 2024 (302 comments)

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33287618 - Oct 2022 (112 comments)

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27411276 - June 2021 (115 comments)

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20543495 - July 2019 (87 comments)

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16574248 - March 2018 (51 comments)

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9395284 - April 2015 (61 comments)

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5519158 - April 2013 (86 comments)

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years by Peter Norvig (2001) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3439772 - Jan 2012 (29 comments)

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191235 - May 2008 (19 comments)

Norvig: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243 - Aug 2007 (7 comments)

Please don't sneer at imaginary commenters on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Could you please stop posting ragey comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

It's not okay to assert that anyone “deserves a bullet in the head” here, for any reason. In the case in question, clearly the system, and multiple people within it, failed to notice the issue. On HN we expect people to be thoughtful and curious, and ”bullet in the head” is a barbaric, medieval reaction to a modern scenario.

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.

Charging? It likely adds a lot of cost and complexity to add mag-charging if you’re not Apple or Samsung. Does Garmin even have it yet? (Edit: only on a small number of models at the premium end of their range.)

So it’s an important differentiator from Garmin, which uses a proprietary connector for its charging cable, that is easy to lose/break and expensive to replace (from personal experience with a 2022 Epix).

We've banned this account. Please stop spamming HN with promotional links. It's a waste of everyone's time.