The Dang is doing a great job at keeping the discussion "civil". As long as one doesn't count certain groups as people.
All people are counted as people by HN moderators. If it seems otherwise to you, I imagine that this is a combination of you having (1) not many explicit data points from us and (2) strong priors on the topic.
That is not a joke, unfortunately. Thankfully I didn't think highly of YC in the first place so it wasn't horribly shocking.