[dang]

All: the hellish and puerile flamewar that many of you stooped to in this thread is exactly what HN is not for. We ban accounts that post like this, so please don't post like this.

What an embarrassment.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I suppose I'd better add that this isn't about which side you're on. It's just about having an international forum that doesn't suck and doesn't destroy itself. All of you flaming each other in this thread have made HN suck (in this neighborhood) and contributed to destroying it.

No more of this, please. You can make your substantive points without any of that. If you can't, please don't post until you can.

[alaricus]

There was no flame war in this thread. But there is clear evidence of abuse and harassment by a mod. I'm flagging dang's post in the hope that a real moderator will look at it.

What an embarrassment indeed. Hackernews deserves better moderation.

[dang]

Certainly, people can and do have different ideas of what counts as a flamewar. In that sense it's just a difference of opinion and that's fine. However, we're trying for HN to be a particular kind of web forum. The principles of what we're trying for are expressed at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Many comments in this thread broke those principles quite badly.