That site has been banned on HN for years. We're happy to make exceptions for specific cases where there's a substantive post, though, like this one.
HN is part of the liberal groupthink.
Fuck your lies you loser.
'Breitbart News Network (known commonly as Breitbart News, Breitbart or Breitbart.com) is a far-right[6] syndicated American news, opinion and commentary[7][8] website founded in mid-2007 by conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart, who conceived it as "the Huffington Post of the right."[4][9][10] Its journalists are widely considered to be ideologically driven, and some of its content has been called misogynistic, xenophobic, and racist by liberals and many traditional conservatives alike.[11] The site has published a number of falsehoods, conspiracy theories,[12][13][14][15][16] and intentionally misleading stories.[17][18]
'Breitbart News aligned with the alt-right under the management of former executive chairman Steve Bannon,[19] who declared the website "the platform for the alt-right" in 2016.[20] In 2016, Breitbart News became a virtual rallying spot for supporters of Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.[11] The company's management, together with former staff member Milo Yiannopoulos, solicited ideas for stories from, and worked to advance and market ideas of, neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups and individuals.[21][22] After the election, more than 2,000 organizations removed Breitbart News from ad buys following Internet activism campaigns denouncing the site's controversial positions.[23][24][25][26]'
So... pretty low credibility. They break substantive stories when they're useful to their agenda, but also break false stories when they're useful to their agenda. I'm curious what you consider to be a 'less credible left leaning site'?
It's not public, but it wouldn't be hard to approximate from public data.
Why not?
Would you please stop? HN is for curious humans to exchange thoughts in community. Few things undermine curiosity or community more. We frequently ask users not to accuse each other of astroturfing or shilling without evidence, but when we do find evidence—and there's a lot of it in this case—we go from tolerant to severe pretty quickly.
(All: this is not about the thread topic, politics, or Google in general—only a malignant kind of forum abuse. I hesitate to post it in an already-controversial thread, but the data are so clear that I decided not to wait.)
You're implying that you have an admin UI that lets you see all our other logins? (matched on IP or cookies I guess?) Or did you do a one-off query just for that guy?
Since YC applications are attached to HN accounts, do you guys check comments made on alt accounts too?
Tracking is useful for moderating but I want to confirm that I can treat my throwaways as throwaways.
The written FAQ doesn't exactly encourage them: "Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create them routinely. On HN, users should have an identity that others can relate to. "
Separate from dang's moderator tools, you might also note that there are strong claims that textual analysis can reliably associate related accounts even without inside information: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17944348
I am not at that level of paranoia yet, but I do rotate my accounts once a year to avoid accumulating too much information under one username. This is usually enough to prevent stylometric analysis. So I just need to worry about people with access to HN database/logs/moderation tools, assuming HN itself never gets compromised.
I guess I just want some reassurance that the tracking is being done responsibly and is considered privileged information only used as needed to keep the site working (moderating is pretty fair) and nothing else. Bonus points if the session logs aren't kept forever (something something GDPR compliance?).