tomhow

They didn't file false (or, any) reports.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49701814.

The story has been widely discussed on the web for over a year [1]. It's happily shared in this post because the email it generated was patently ridiculous. No report was filed to the FBI and if it was it would have gone straight to the trash.

Obviously it would be bad if a serious report was filed; the company shows every sign of being aware of the dangers of this.

It would have been easy to look into this before posting all these scolding comments. We're really not meant to be so humorless on a site called “Hacker News”.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22URGENT%3A+ESCALATION+TO+F...

They're entitled to defend themselves against accusations of things they haven't done, and also to respond to questions or assertions about their project. We encourage project creators to engage in the discussions about their projects. This is a normal part of building and launching a project.

The submitter's replies are defensive because people are accusing them of coordinated voting, which is not evident to us. The post hit the front page due to the second chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), then quickly got upvotes that seem completely authentic.

The post was placed on the front page via second chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308). This happens all the time on HN.

The voting is legitimate; there's no evidence that the voting is from sockpuppets or anyone else connected with the team/project. We always monitor the discussion and the voting, and if the discussion is not of sufficient quality, the post will not stay on the front page for long.

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

Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49694296.

It would be crossing a line for us to ban or penalize sites in response to complaints about the back button.

In this particular instance, it works fine for me on Chrome. When I test it in Safari, I can see the same behaviour that people are complaining about, but I also find that if you double-click the back button, it takes you back to HN.

I point that out because it seems clear to me that the site author has not set out to implement a “dark pattern” to trick visitors into staying on their site against their will; they've just tried to implement some in-page navigation, and perhaps only tested it in Chrome.

That's outside the boundary of reasonable grounds for us to penalize a page or site. It puts us in the position of having to investigate a page's behaviour in different browsers and to adjudicate on the severity of the dysfunctional browser behaviour and the author's intent (i.e., their inner thoughts). We clearly can't be getting into that; it takes up too much time and we will never be able to consistently reach fair decisions.

I can understand the frustration, but as well as asking HN users not to fixate on offtopic distractions like this, we also ask people to "assume good faith", and I see no reason not to follow that guideline in this case.

A quick email to the author would have more likely led to a favourable outcome than this meta-subthread.

Do you intend to observe the guidelines or not?

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

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.

We've banned this account.

Many thanks!

Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49662371.

Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49662371.

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

Updated from https://gizmodo.com/this-nasa-color-trick-was-meant-for-mars..., thanks!

Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49647300.

Comments moved thither. Thanks!

WTF? Please don't fantasize about building concentration camps or use vile terms of derision on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here, and we have to ban accounts that do this repeatedly. No matter how upset you are at GitHub, you owe this community better if you want to participate here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Almost every comment I can see from this account is a brief, snarky swipe, lacking any substance nor even a period at the end of the sentence, which is a hallmark of low-effort participation. It's honestly hard to know if these comments are human written or bot generated, so, in the absence of any redeeming qualities, the account is now banned.

Comments moved thither. Thanks!

Thanks, we've updated the link.

People have always complained about HN being too snarky, or snarkier than it used to be. Comments like this don't help; they just compound the snark!

Comments moved thither. Thanks!

Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49630583.

There will always be a range of views about whether an article is good or not; there's no universal definition of “low quality submission”. HN’s ethos is to surface content that “gratifies intellectual curiosity”. Often we only really know whether an article fits that description once we see the discussion thread. You're welcome to flag submissions you think are not fit for HN, or to email hn@ycombinator.com to point out why an article is unfit for the front page. And you can make a substantive comment critiquing the article.

We've banned this account. Please stop registering accounts to break the guidelines with. It's a waste of everyone's time.

We just need you to observe the guidelines, no matter the topic or no matter how much it seems justifiable to overlook them in a particular case. They've been largely constant for nearly 20 years, and HN only continues to be a place where people want to discuss important topics because we have guidelines and uphold them daily. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Related ongoing thread:

Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49616968 - Sept 2026 (276 comments)