> Playing with daddy's money

Personal attacks like this are not ok.

Sure, criticize their actions, but don't parlay that into this kind of personal swipe at the individuals and their families; that's when the line is crossed from valid critique of actions to nasty mob pile-on, and that's never ok here.

Not that it should matter but as far as I can tell, the Pickle founder/CEO grew up and studied in Korea, and we have no idea what their family circumstances were.

This guy did something very immoral and callous, and will seemingly face no real consequences for it. Roasting him in the comments of the site of the people paying him is somehow overkill?

None of us knows exactly what this specific person did or what their motivation, intention or understanding of the situation was. We only know what was in the company’s code that was published, and we know what they’ve done since to try and address it.

“Roasting” is one word for something that can be described in far more serious terms. It’s against the HN guidelines and the guidelines still have to be upheld to some degree.

It’s also false that they will face no real consequences. They’ll never forget this experience and these sorts of things are often terminal for a company.

My speculation is based on well-established heuristics like Hanlon’s Razor and the presumption that people act in line with their incentives.

From the earliest time I became involved with YC (nearly 17 years ago) it was drummed into us that you don’t mess around with IP, because it kills funding rounds, acquisitions and commercial deals, and harms one’s reputation and stirs up unwelcome attention just like this.

I’ve been subjected to suspected theft of my IP by a client and I can absolutely empathize with the feeling of outrage from people who’ve been subjected to this; it was one of the very worst things I’ve experienced in my career.

But there are well-established conventions for how to deal with it, which begins with a demand to stop doing it and not do it again (“cease and desist”).

Of course this company should stop and not do it again and it’s completely reasonable for them to be held to account on that.

But if HN commenters are demanding someone else be honest and honorable, they need to be willing to hold themselves to the same standard, and it’s a basic societal norm that we allow legal processes to progress and not take matters into their own hands with personal vilification/mockery or exaggerated/unfounded allegations.

I think you are so comprehensively wrong that there’s not enough commonality between our worldviews for me to even try to convince you

>They’ll never forget this experience

Right. They'll learn to be more discreet about it next time. Do you really believe "I got flamed on the Internet" is a memory that will counterbalance "I can make millions out of selling stolen code if I don't get caught" ? (especially considering that you flag such comments, therefore their shielding their poor egos from seeing mean words.)

>these sorts of things are often terminal for a company.

Starting a company is not hard. Thousands are created, and destroyed each day. If they're smart, under someone else's name. Maybe, maybe one person will see <generic AI company name> and think to look at the CEO, remember what he did and potentially try to warn people about it, and they'll be promptly ignored. Helped by people like you, under the guise of muh guidelines

>“Roasting” is one word for something that can be described in far more serious terms

I'd love to hear those terms. Because the worst that comes to mind that could apply is "disparaging", and unfortunately for them, "being mean on the internet" isn't something they can or will sue over.

> "I can make millions out of selling stolen code if I don't get caught"

This is the opposite of what happens and YC drums this into founders from the start; at least they did in my day, because pg's main startup (Viaweb) was nearly brought undone by an IP dispute, and it scarred him deeply.

What YC tells you is that the more successful you are, the more likely it is that you'll be caught if you mis-use IP, and auditing this is one of the biggest parts of the due diligence that investors, acquirers and commercial partners will undertake.

In fact, pg explicitly addresses this very thing in his 2005 essay How To Start a Startup [1], which was the original inspiration for YC:

One of the worst things that can happen to a startup is to run into intellectual property problems. We did, and it came closer to killing us than any competitor ever did.

As we were in the middle of getting bought, we discovered that one of our people had, early on, been bound by an agreement that said all his ideas belonged to the giant company that was paying for him to go to grad school. In theory, that could have meant someone else owned big chunks of our software. So the acquisition came to a screeching halt while we tried to sort this out. The problem was, since we'd been about to be acquired, we'd allowed ourselves to run low on cash. Now we needed to raise more to keep going. But it's hard to raise money with an IP cloud over your head, because investors can't judge how serious it is.

[1] https://paulgraham.com/start.html

Sometimes it's really surprising what comments you guys push back on and which ones you don't comment on. (Yes, I know, you can't see everything, etc.). I suspect it might be because this one wasn't dressed up enough.

While it is a personal attack, it is pretty tame compared to (non-flagged) comments I see here every day. I especially don't see it as a swipe at their family. Yet this is a pretty strong rebuke.

While I highly doubt it's because the subject is a YC pick, the optics aren't great.

FWIW, that comment looked like an egregious personal attack to me too (and yes I hear you that you're not defending that post! but rather asking a fair question about moderation standards).

If there are comments that are that bad or worse floating around HN, which aren't getting flagged and/or replied to by moderators, we really need to see them. If you can recall where any of them are, and can dig up links, we'd appreciate it. Failing that, if you (or anyone) see cases of this in the future, we'd appreciate a heads-up.

The one thing I can imagine you might be referring to are some of the recent politically charged threads where people were really going after each other. Those are hard to moderate without coming across as taking one political side against another (which we're careful not to, but this is easy to miss when passions are high). But even in those cases we do our best to make sure that the guideline-violating comments get flagged.

I realize you already alluded to this when you say "Yes, I know, you can't see everything," but that really is the only reason why comments of this sort should be going unflagged or unmoderated on HN. There's a lot that we just don't see here—there's far too much for us to read it all, and we rely on users bringing it to our attention.

I wasn’t surprised by the pushback. This isn’t like responding to a pseudonymous HN comment opting into a discussion, they are talking about specific people and posting pointedly mean-spirited remarks towards a party that has not opted to discuss their provenance.

The response could’ve been better worded but you can see how no one would want to moderate a community that makes it a habit to disparage specific people outside of a good faith discussion.

>I wasn’t surprised by the pushback.

This comment broke the guidelines. I'm not saying it shouldn't have been moderated. I made a meta comment on the overall moderation on HN, which sometimes surprises me in which comments get reprimanded and which ones don't (and with what amount of vigor the reprimand is delivered with).

You should temper that observation with the realization that this particular thread is under a microscope. The HN mods moderate less when YC companies are involved, but somewhat ironically that actually requires more of their attention, since they need to counteract some automations. So they are more likely to spot comments here.

There’s something about the point when anger at someone’s actions turns to trawling over someone’s backstory in order to attack/demean them as a person that crosses a line for me; I’ve always pushed back on it whenever I’ve seen it, on HN and elsewhere. People doing it and supporting it always think it’s “not that bad”; nobody likes to think of themselves as doing or supporting something bad.

Any time you see egregious comments on HN that aren’t flagged/dead, you should flag them and email us so we can take a look.

>People doing it and supporting it always think it’s “not that bad”; nobody likes to think of themselves as doing “bad”.

So we're clear, because this implies I'm "supporting" it, I'm not. Just saying that this is more tame than many personal attacks I've seen, with a stronger response than I've seen (when there is a response). And, in this case, that gives off some bad optics/more ammo to people who are critical about when & why you moderate.

Without moderator transparency (which I've read the reasoning for, and can agree with!), optics is really all you've got.

In the context of this thread (and not other supposedly worse comments in other threads that I’m not able to evaluate), having allowed pretty much everything and anything to be said, I’m comfortable with this point - the point where things turn personally nasty - being the point where I draw a line and push back.

I’m not saying that at all. I just can’t explain the disparity in our responses when I don’t know exactly what the comparison is. I’m not surprised to hear you’ve seen worse things. As you concede, we can’t see everything and we don’t respond to everything and there are all kinds of reasons for handling things differently, a major one being randomness.

But in the context of this thread, it has largely been the free-for-all that people want it to be but I’ve drawn a line at one point where things crossed over into being personally nasty and I haven’t yet seen a reason why what was a wrong call. I know some people will criticize me for that and I’m comfortable with that.

>someone’s actions turns to trawling over someone’s backstory

"using daddy's money" when talking about a VC funded founder is such a safe bet that if Berkshire Hathaway could invest in it, they would.

It’s obviously diminutive and patronizing, and makes implications or assumptions about them and their families that are based on stereotypes or sparse information. It’s clearly against the guidelines and the guidelines aren’t discarded altogether just because a YC company is involved.

damn right it's diminutive, and why the hell not? these clowns and the idiots who fund their tomfoolery deserve it

We have no idea what the realities of their lives are.

We only know the basic facts of the wrongdoing that’s been reported here, which is of course fine to criticize.

YC isn't that unknown and you can absolutely judge that org for funding stuff like this, you really don't need that much detail. And if you have interacted with a lot of the "founders" you know that statistically you're in the clear to judge them all too. It's a pretty weird world where a lot of dumb exists, like A LOT. The realities of their lives are frankly immaterial anyway, it's about the output (and input in case of VC money).