[dang]

> I have a policy to return hostility in kind.

In that case you can't comment here. "But he started it" is an acceptable excuse neither from 5-year-olds nor from HN commenters. It always feels like the other person started it and did worse.

> I would like to seriously discuss the suppression of critical thought on Hacker News, and why moderators such as yourself enforce it ruthlessly

This is obviously just polemic, and boilerplate at that. We might as well "discuss" whether I've stopped beating my wife.

Ideological harangues have no place on this site, so please don't post any more of them.

[FD3SA]

You've confirmed all my suspicions regarding HN and YC's ideological positions.

Thank you, I will not be posting further on this site or directing any business your way.

[tomhoward]

As I pointed out in another comment in this thread, in this past 24 hours Dang has been attacked in a similar way from someone on the opposite side of this debate to you.

And as I also said in that comment, if you knew what a decent and thoughtful person Dang is, and how deeply emotionally invested he is in making HN a place of civility and intellectually stimulating discussion, you'd be appalled at how cruel you and others have been to him in this thread.

[ryanx435]

To be fair to the person you are responding too, he is right: your totalitarian censorship was the primary reason I did not apply to Y combinator with my startup and refuse to comment on new threads, except on special circumstances such as this.

You are a petty tyrant, dang, working for an organization actively trying to push an agenda by suppressing reason and free speech.

I hope you rot in hell.

[tomhoward]

I hope you rot in hell.

Holy shit.

So this is considered a proportionate response to a person's efforts to cultivate civil discussion and hold firm in the face of escalating incivility.

You may not be aware that HN is an independent arm of YC.

Yes Dang is a salaried employee of YC, but he's a talented programmer who could probably earn a much better living doing something else.

He does this job because he loves HN and is emotionally invested in making it a safe place for intellectually stimulating discussions.

You should consider that Dang gets comments that are equally vitriolic from people on the opposite side of this debate to you. He did in another thread in the past 24 hours. So this is nothing about pushing some YC-driven PC agenda.

This is simply about avoiding topics that give people license to co-opt science or any other justification to be mean to one another and degenerating out of control, just as this one has.

If you knew Dang and knew how burdened he was by the sense of obligation to this community (not to YC) to keep it a civil and intellectually stimulating place, you'd be devastated at what a cruel comment it is that you've made here.

[DanBC]

It's amazing, disappointing, to see that comment not heavily downvoted or flagged.

[tomhoward]

I think (and hope) that's more to do with it being late in the thread and flying under the radar than any kind of endorsement from any significant portion of the community.

Skirmishes like this aside, on the whole I find things good and continually getting better here in terms of civility and interesting content.

But my God, what it must be like for Dan to have to go to sleep with the thought "today a person told me that he hopes I rot in hell because he disagreed with the way I went about trying to hose down a flame war".