I don't see how private citizens discussing their political views is "substantive", there is nothing remotely controversial in that footage, this is just fodder for partisans.
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?).