It's basically random, depending on where you live. (Another thing that hasn't changed since Paul Graham was in high school.[0]) I think that the shitty things you see on places like HN are on an upward trend, but it's always been kind of bad. If you want to get an education into how long this sort of thing has been going on, try one of the reddit threads that pops up every so often with a title like "Did you ever get expelled? What for?"
Yeah, I actually went and checked that out after posting. By then though noprocrast had kicked in and I couldn't fix it. I'd append the relevant post here, but somebody already did it to the OP.