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Comment by sugarwater | Hacker News Reader

It's worth mentioning the the CEO Austen had a post on here (now deleted) proclaiming to have creating a bot army via stealing people's pictures on Instagram.

I would qualify that as "underhanded"

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Link to the post: https://web.archive.org/web/20190703224616/https://news.ycom...

It's also weird that the post is still up, but the username was changed from austenallred to another user: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13502774

Dang, is this a normal feature? Since when are users able to retroactively change the profile that made the comment? This looks like covering up a YC founder's past comment, but the archive still exists. According to snapshots it was modified over 2 years later.

This is not a feature available to mere mortals. Your assumption seems likely.

Even more than that, one of the administrators previously told me via email that HN is not able to rename accounts (presumably they use account names instead of numeric IDs as a key somewhere). So the only explanation for the displayed author on that post having changed is that they switched the author of the post, the original author's account could not have been renamed.

The account creation date for user _pecl is also the same date the comment was made so maybe it is possible to make a new user, change their creation date, and also change the attribution of specific comments to that user?

It's also the same month that Lambda School was launched⁽¹⁾, and there's no doubt re. Allred's prior interest in gaming Twitter⁽²⁾.

[1] https://twitter.com/calebhicks/status/1093885962059272193

[2] https://medium.com/user-acquisition-for-hackers/exploiting-t...

Either that email was many years ago or something got confused, because we rename accounts for users all the time.

In fact, when we developed that feature, I replied to everyone who had emailed over the years asking for it, asking if they still wanted it. If you weren't on that list, your email must have been many years ago.

Edit: oops - I see I neglected the important thing. If you still want your account to be renamed, please email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll be happy to help!

The full range of everything we do is available to anyone who asks. You have to email hn@ycombinator.com, as the FAQ explains (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html), but there's no restriction on whom we help, or how. We help people who have abused this site for years and then ask us (sometimes exceedingly impolitely!) to clean up what they did, and we treat them the same way as we treat anyone; I may grit my teeth while doing it, but that's all. Why? Because it's best for the community in the long run if we treat everyone the same way, and because—as I tell users who email—we don't want anyone to get in trouble from anything they posted to HN.

Good to hear, I'm very happy to be corrected on this. Thanks!

The usual best way to get in touch with dang (or another mod) is to email hn@ycombinator.com. Likely to get a better answer via email, or perhaps he'll comment here if you call attention to it that way.

If something like this really happened, this is pretty disturbing. The _pecl account that now owns that comment was created on the same day the comment was posted, has 1 karma, and has not posted anything else.

Edit: just emailed hn@; hopefully someone there will follow up on this.

We take care of privacy requests for HN users every day. 99% (maybe 99.9% – I haven't counted) of those users aren't YC founders. There's no special treatment.

If you look at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html, there's an explanation there about how we usually don't delete entire account histories, but we do other things to help, and invite people to email us if they have concerns. There are tradeoffs between individual needs for privacy, fairness to the other commenters who participated in a thread, the community's interest in preserving its archive, and so on. We care about all of that and do our best to help whoever asks; as I tell people who write in, we just try to do it with more precise tools than wholesale deletion, and have built up a bag of tricks for that over the years. Obviously that doesn't extend to the Internet Archive or whatever other caches of HN posts are out there; users understand that.

When it comes to this sort of issue on HN, it's important for people to understand that there are no good answers—it's all tradeoffs. Because the pendulum has swung towards privacy concerns in recent years, we regularly get flamed for not deleting entire account histories. But we still get flamed from the classic internet perspective (nothing should be censored, etc.) too.

Appreciate the clarification that it's not YC-founder specific and a further read of your comments and newsfaq on this makes it clear the tradeoff between privacy and maintaining HN thread history, and I think the right choice has been made. Thanks

This is a really kind answer. You’re a good person and we’re all lucky to have you.

a user, it might be noted, for whom that is the only comment.

The incredibly gross thing is that all but two replies are encouraging of that kind of behavior. The two that are negative and call out the dishonesty are downvoted.

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