> It's time you stopped taking threads off-topic into whatever your personal thing is with YC/HN.

I thought HackerNews readers who read "Keeping Secrets" would be a good group to discuss the secret keeping of HackerNews with.

I don't think that is off-topic at all, but I think it's fine if you disagree and respect your opinion.

> It's time you stopped taking threads off-topic into whatever your personal thing is with YC/HN

I think maybe you have filters setup or something that might show you a biased subset of my comments here. I just checked, and I had to go back 57 comments to find my last comment about my gripes with YC/HN. So ~2% of my comments might fit that bill. If only 2% of my comments are critical of YC, and if a high % of those are flagged (like this one), then that is a bit worrisome.

Keep in mind I'm not harping on YC/HN to switch to Python or something. I am drilling in on one specific thing I think YC is getting wrong. And I am doing it because I think YC going more open would be better for YC, and be better for the world.

When I started at Microsoft in 2014, people made fun of me for immediately installing Ubuntu on my Windows machine. I also constantly blasted "source depot (sd)", and pushed for github over and over again.

A few years later, Windows shipped with Ubuntu and bought GitHub. And the stock price has done quite well.

I would not push hard for something if I thought it was unimportant, or if I did not care for the organization.

> As far as I know the only secrets anybody is keeping

Does HackerNews not have a lot of secret features that regular HN users are not informed of? Does Bookface not have a lot of secret features people are told not to share/talk about? Does YC still do "off the record" dinners, where speakers sometimes tell tales of questionable behavior? Doesn't Jessica Livingston have a whole essay on her blog at this very moment (https://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/the-sound-of-silence) admitting to having a lot of secrets [to her credit she seems to lament that!]?

So can you explain to me how you don't know of any secrets?

> with your own behavior

I have done many dumb things in my life. When I do something wrong, it's generally out of acting too fast emotionally, and not taking the time to contemplate the best moves, and later I apologize and try to learn from it.

I am sorry to anyone at YC who I hurt with my behavior in 2022. I exceeded the speed limit. However, my intentions were always good, and I think my actions, as ridiculous as they were, have helped reveal for many people what the speed limits are--something not talked about much. I am happy to be a guinea pig if it helps other people.

And the positives to the world from what we've built and the impact of what we are doing will be far greater than the harm to people's feelings from those relatively small hours when I was behaving far worse than my potential.

> If you want to blog or whatever about how you're being persecuted, fine, but I don't see what obligation HN has to serve as a platform for it.

Again, a small % of my posts are critical of HN/YC. I do see why HN has an obligation: gratitude. I've been here since nearly the beginning, and have done my best to help likely thousands of startups and founders. I've given advice, time, hundreds of thousands in donations to HN users struggling with various things, have probably gotten thousands of people to sign up myself over the past ~16 years, etc. I obviously thoroughly enjoy this community, and get a lot of out of it myself, but I have pored a ton of myself into it as well, both online and in the offline relationships with other HN users.

I think it's disrespectful to someone like me to block my emails, and flag my posts. I feel like I deserve better treatment than that.