This is incredible. I've never seen anything like this in my entire life.

A company blatantly pissing off much of its would-be userbase and sticking to its grossly incompetent guns, obviously not caring at all.

I literally cannot imagine a way they could handle this more poorly.

This has to be mental illness or drugs. Completely bizarre.

Another possibility, but not a likely one, is that the site has been hacked by someone that is trying to make them look as bad as possible.

Unless this hacker was able to get the COO's HN account as well that seems unlikely. And even then a call to someone at YC to jump into the thread and let everyone know it was a hack wouldn't be too hard.

Yeah, their CEO. cymbal

Bit frustrating that you see poor behaviour that's hard to understand and leap to "mentally ill", rather than "scumbag".

That's just trying desperately to give the benefit of the doubt. "Surely no one would be this bad on purpose."

As austenallred mentioned, I'm trying to give them the benefit of the doubt.

But by linking mental illness to scumbag behaviour you're making life worse for all the people with mental illness who aren't scumbags - which is most of them.

A group that I am a member of. Perhaps I'm biased but I don't feel like my life is particularly worsened.

I've had the misfortune of bearing witness to paranoia fueled by both mental illness and drug abuse (and a combination of both). I've also worked with and for unapologetic assholes. There are things about this case and his communications that have me leaning toward the former.

This behaviour is absolutely incredible, probably the most tone-deaf response I've ever seen.

Good catch.

The vitriol was spelt LIIVECODING now it has been corrected to LIVECODING - wow, just wow.

It's like watching sourceforge implode all over again.

I wonder why they didn't fix the plus sign.