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The most recent 60 (!) comments plus every submission of the last 6 months were all about the same thing. That's extreme. The posts didn't all mention that specific project, but there was only one topic and they were extremely repetitive. This is not a close call.

I made it all the way back to https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=atomic128&next=4628060... (6 months ago) before seeing posts about anything else, only to find that there was a different agenda before that. Not cool.

Edit: and before all that, there was this: https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=atomic128&next=4164795.... This is obviously not using HN as intended.

by dredmorbius14 hours ago|

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Exceptions?

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47116093> (LLM but not PF).

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47095664> (a16h)

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46695693> (vuln exploits) 2026-1-20

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46280602> (???, but not PF)

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46195234> (Monero / Dark Web) 2025-12-8

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45894305> and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45826273> (Tor hidden service) Nov 2025

That's from the past 20 comments.

Submissions: 8 most recent on PF, 9+ cover nuclear power, Tor dark web, robotaxis, and other topics.

Again: Not a one-note flute, though fairly focused of late on AI and poisoning.

Again: I think the ban is unwarranted. I'm not sure what's driving your thinking here, but a no-warnings ban seems excessive. And given YC's current preponderance of AI/agentic launches (<https://news.ycombinator.com/launches>), self-serving and contrary to the "we moderate YC stories less" guideline.

(Yes, I'm aware "less" isn't "none", and this is an account/user rather than story, I hope my point stands and is clear.)

The Yann LeCun posts you link are ... a bit OTT. That's also a couple of years ago.

I've said my bit. I'm hoping you and atomic128 can come to an understanding in email.

by dataflow17 hours ago|

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> Such as, say, Jon Corbet (@corbet), of LWN, whose activity on HN shows a similar pattern and roughly equivalent frequency.

I took a look at the most recent comments from both accounts and they don't look similar to me in this respect.

I think there are two questions here though:

1. Was the violation egregious?

2. Did it deserve an immediate ban, or did they deserve a warning etc.?

Seems to me the answer to (1) is yes, but the answer to (2) I'm less sure about.

by dredmorbius13 hours ago|

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Jon's been around a while and some of the piss and vinegar of youth may have subsided. He does tend to show up with LWN comes up, whether as a topic of discussion (or more often) from submitted articles. That's his baliwick, and again, I don't fault him at all for it.

Our other friend here is a more recent participant to HN, at least under this handle. (I don't know that there are others, only what I can see from this one.)

by fragmede20 hours ago|

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I think the reasoning is about having alt accounts for different purposes. He intention is to map one human to one account and have all of their thoughts from that one account, instead of one human having one account to discuss scraping on, and a different account to discuss crypto on.

by dredmorbius19 hours ago|

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I'm pretty confident it's not that.

HN's prime directive is "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity": <https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html> and many, many, many dang comments.

I'm pretty sure that the specific gripe is posting excessively (not even necessarily exclusively) on a single topic or theme. See <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19392902> for a more detailed comment from dang.

Occasional alts are explicitly permitted, though not to engage in abuse (e.g., mutual admiration societies, sock-puppetry). See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9963551> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9823379> (both against sock puppetry) and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9122086> and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7504621> (on where throwaways are/aren't permitted).

Where HN does favour persistent accounts the stated claim is to foster community, rather than for nefarious tracking purposes: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18082346> and <https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>. From that last:

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.