Hacker News: tomhow

New comment by tomhow in "Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident"

tomhow — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 03:24:25 +0000

> We'd have never progressed as a species with your mentality.

Please avoid swipes like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

New comment by tomhow in "Artemis II safely splashes down"

tomhow — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 03:21:38 +0000

The guidelines ask us to avoid being curmudgeonly. I'm sure you didn't mean to come across that way, but could you try not to make Hacker News the kind of place that responds with “meh” to a successful space mission?

New comment by tomhow in "OpenClaw’s memory is unreliable, and you don’t know when it will break"

tomhow — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:28:03 +0000

Please don't do this here.

New comment by tomhow in "Show HN: Eve – Managed OpenClaw for work"

tomhow — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:18:24 +0000

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

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

New comment by tomhow in "New iPhone age and identity checks restrict internet freedom in the UK"

tomhow — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 14:17:26 +0000

You were asked to keep to the guidelines just a few weeks ago, particularly relating to making swipes at the community, and you committed to doing so: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47243319. We wouldn't be having this interaction if you had kept to that commitment, nor if you had respectfully heeded the reminder I posted. This place only continues to exist because enough other people conduct themselves respectfully.

New comment by tomhow in "Microsoft suspends dev accounts for high-profile open source projects"

tomhow — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 13:39:36 +0000

Please don't. We have to ban accounts that do this repeatedly.

New comment by tomhow in "New iPhone age and identity checks restrict internet freedom in the UK"

tomhow — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 11:09:29 +0000

Please don’t try to deflect from your own disrespectful conduct with this kind of “are you going to...?” goading. We don’t moderate on the basis of such charged qualitative judgments as “fake news”. We uphold the guidelines. If someone is wrong, point out how they are wrong, in the conversational style the guidelines clearly call for. Doing it in this sneering and hostile way only weakens your point and trashes this place.

New comment by tomhow in "New iPhone age and identity checks restrict internet freedom in the UK"

tomhow — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 06:11:06 +0000

> Ah, the classic "aPpLe cAn dO nO wRoNg" comment from a thread full of nothing but Apple lovers.

Hey, this is an awful comment from someone who has been on HN long enough to know better. That random capitalization thing is a cheap form of sneering, as well as being a tired old internet trope, and the whole comment breaks this guideline:

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

This site is only a place where people want to participate because most people make the effort to do better than this. Please do your part to push the standards up rather than drag them down.

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

New comment by tomhow in "Many African families spend fortunes burying their dead"

tomhow — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 05:33:45 +0000

Hey, this kind of defiant strutting is not cool. It's fine to disagree with the article, and you don't owe the author anything, but you owe this community better if you want to participate here. HN is only a place where people like to participate because we have clear guidelines and many people who make the effort each day to uphold them. It's not OK to disrespect this community by acting as if the guidelines don't apply to you. A particular pattern in your comments is using capitalization for emphasis, which is explicitly against the guidelines. Please take a moment to remind yourself of the guidelines and take care to observe them in future.

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

New comment by tomhow in "Many African families spend fortunes burying their dead"

tomhow — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 23:05:24 +0000

Please don’t post sneering dismissals of imagined arguments on HN. We’re trying for curious conversation here.

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

New comment by tomhow in "LittleSnitch for Linux"

tomhow — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 14:06:29 +0000

WTF? This is not an acceptable comment on HN, no matter who or what you're replying to. This style of commenting is 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.

New comment by tomhow in "They're made out of meat (1991)"

tomhow — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 02:24:56 +0000

That isn't always a simple, reliable way of finding the historical submissions of the article. Sometimes it's on a domain that has had many other submissions. Sometimes the domain has changed or the content appears in different forms in different places.

It's a longstanding convention to do this, and the audience appreciates it. Not sure why anyone would take issue with it.

New comment by tomhow in "They're made out of meat (1991)"

tomhow — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 02:07:01 +0000

It's not a reproach at all! We do this all the time when something has appeared before on HN, so that people can look at older threads if they're interested. It's significant signal that a particular post has appeared repeatedly on HN over the nearly two decades we've existed. It's also interesting to see how the style of discussion about the topic may have changed over time.

New comment by tomhow in "Show HN: Orange Juice – Small UX improvements that make HN easier to read"

tomhow — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 01:18:16 +0000

Of course, and part of my reason for being brought onto the team full time is to explore ways we can develop HN for the future. That doesn't mean that every 3rd-party HN project represents a feature that should be added to the core HN UI.

New comment by tomhow in "Show HN: Orange Juice – Small UX improvements that make HN easier to read"

tomhow — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 01:06:47 +0000

Dan and I are full time YC employees and other engineers at YC do plenty to keep HN running. HN’s software is continually developed to handle growth in traffic, along with abuse, spam, and (particularly recently) bots and generated content. The lack of new UI features is not due to lack of resources/investment but because it’s always been the HN way to maintain a minimalist design and for the content and discussions to be the primary feature.

New comment by tomhow in "They're made out of meat (1991)"

tomhow — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 13:42:26 +0000

Previously...

They're Made Out of Meat (1991) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43994603 - May 2025 (3 comments)

They're Made Out of Meat (1991) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38420111 - Nov 2023 (168 comments)

They're made out of meat (1991) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31965062 - July 2022 (151 comments)

They're Made Out of Meat (1991) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24737993 - Oct 2020 (292 comments)

They're Made Out of Meat [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23436550 - June 2020 (4 comments)

They're Made Out of Meat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11561522 - April 2016 (3 comments)

They're made out of meat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8910420 - Jan 2015 (1 comment)

They're Made out of Meat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8152131 - Aug 2014 (170 comments)

They're made out of meat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8098264 - July 2014 (1 comment)

"They're Made out of Meat?" Short first contact sci-fi story - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3549320 - Feb 2012 (62 comments)

They're made out of Meat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=774139 - Aug 2009 (3 comments)

New comment by tomhow in "Trump suspends Iran attack for two weeks, subject to Hormuz Strait opening"

tomhow — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:14:53 +0000

Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47682276.

New comment by tomhow in "US, Iran to pause war, agree to 2-week ceasefire"

tomhow — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:08:55 +0000

Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47682276.

New comment by tomhow in "Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?"

tomhow — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 13:57:04 +0000

We've banned this account.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47668579 and marked off-topic.

New comment by tomhow in "OpenClaw privilege escalation vulnerability"

tomhow — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 23:49:21 +0000

Thanks for the discussion and (partially) understanding :)

The use of terms like “moral bankruptcy” is exactly what the guidelines ask us to avoid, indeed explicitly so with the phrase “Assume good faith”.

Part of the challenge of participating on HN is to be able to come into contact with people who see and do things differently (including building software projects in a way that's different from the way we consider proper) and find a way to recognize that they are still acting in good faith and deserving of basic courtesy.