Subject: Re: NPR still won't come clean
I offer this as friendly advice.

Most people know of Y-Combinator indirectly because an ex-president, Sam Altman, is the CEO of OpenAI. It is an old startup seed incubator, one of the originals. They would give relatively large groups of very early stage startups relatively small sums of seed money at fixed terms, and then support them in various ways. The founders were mostly from Viaweb (Yahoo! Store) and some widely recognizable companies that came out of there were Reddit, Strip, and AirBnb.

But they have a social media site, Hacker News, that has been a reasonably stable community. The site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/n...) cover content, submissions, and commenting, and I'm just going to reproduce the commenting guidelines here:

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.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.

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

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

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

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".

Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.

Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.

Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put *asterisks* around it and it will get italicized.

Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.

Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.


I don't agree with all of them, and fail to adhere to them too often, but being kind, thoughtful, substantive, negative, avoiding name-caling, assuming positive intent, and thoughtful criticism are pretty great advice. I particularly like the examples of how certain comments can be shortened.