Hacker News Guidelines

That was done to me as well. I still have no idea why and when I finally got it lifted dang didn't know why either. One of the most infuriating experiences I've had in a forum, and actively made worse by the sycophantic adoring articles going around at the time citing their "personal human touch". dang explained that they can't possibly have time to give everyone that personal human touch! But not to the reporters, apparently.

Have you considered asking for a refund?

HN is free. If you paid for it, you have been scammed

He knows that. I suspect he is implying that I have nothing to complain about because it is a free service, which is a pretty vacuous argument.

It's a response to your expectation of personalized service.

Same experience here. I was rate limited a few times, and when I got around to emailing dang, I don’t recall him figuring out why for any of the cases. Kind of annoying but obviously not the end of the world. Not remotely worth complaining about. Would more transparency be nice? Sure but I doubt it scales.

You can always abuse the “Edit” function for a somewhat limited way to reply and have a conversation, but it’s simpler to just drop an email note.

I think you need to take a basic class in ethics if you think ethics are determined entirely by rights and law

A stranger providing you a service for free doesn't have an ethical obligation to answer your emails.

Personally I think they do

Many or most so-called "free" services, e.g., Twitter, Facebook, etc., are a front for another money-making scheme. If you're not the customer, you're the product.

Hacker News is an advertisement for Y Combinator.

Let's not pretend that this is a charity.

It's also worth noting that the operators of such "free" services don't publicly take the haughty attitude of "if you don't like the service, you can have a refund of $0". You'll never hear that rhetoric from dang. They want people to use their services. Only unaffiliated outside defenders use that rhetoric.

The operator of the service hasn't taken that haughty attitude. A fellow user of the service has. They're feeling haughtier by the minute, it seems.

> They're feeling haughtier by the minute, it seems.

Who are you referring to? I'm not the one who requested a response from the moderators.

I'd be interested to learn more about the moral framework that arrives at such a conclusion.

Broadly speaking, the hacker ethos has relied on a "share and enjoy" metric, a direct reference to a bit from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. People sometimes forget that the bit goes on to offer specific suggestions for those who are receiving something for free and have complaints regarding the flavor directed at the provider.

I think that even if you offer a service for free you are obliged to offer a level of quality and support, much like how you can’t just sell poisonous ice cream. I don’t believe in “share and enjoy” and I don’t think that “warranty free” is morally good

It actually has, that sense of obligation is me, since I am the universe

> you can't sell poisonous ice cream

There's licensing around selling food. I wouldn't be against "license to practice software development," but I'd note that (a) that's a very different world than the one we live in and (b) I don't know that most of the open source software we enjoy, hack on, and bemoan would exist in a universe where licensing standards made every software engineer who had authored it beholden to a minimum standard of quality before distributing it.

Would apache have survived in a world where software engineers, or their software, had to be quality-certified? Would MySQL? Would Linux?

Other independent observers may disagree on your self-assessment.

If they think that I’m not the universe, they’re wrong

Again, law is not morality.

> Would apache have survived in a world where software engineers, or their software, had to be quality-certified? Would MySQL? Would Linux?

Yes

My expectation is that he describes his level of personalized service the same way in private emails as in public comments. If you find that expectation overly haughty, well, you know where the refund button is.