I'm sorry that this is necessary, btw. We hate it when legit users get blocked, but HN is also hit by a ton of crawlers and it's hard to distinguish the two. Since our app server runs on a single core, we don't have a drop of spare performance.

Some big improvements which we've been working on for months will hopefully roll out soonish, which should allow us to loosen things up quite a bit.

Wow. Couple of questions :

* where is the server hosted and do you have a db server and maybe a cache server as well? What are the specs of the server?

* how much traffic does HN receive? Daily or monthly hits.

> Some big improvements which we've been working on for months will hopefully roll out soonish

If you're allowed to talk about it, what are the improvements?

  CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2637 v4 @ 3.50GHz (3500.07-MHz K8-class CPU)
  FreeBSD/SMP: 2 package(s) x 4 core(s) x 2 hardware threads
  Mirrored SSDs for data, mirrored magnetic for logs (UFS)

http://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/parallelism.html

If it was something you guys did, awesome, thanks!

@mods: Perhaps after an account gains a certain amount of karma, even 500, that flag could be disabled even for Tor users.

The Chrome network panel shows a 403 code (Forbidden).

Edit: I can write this up in an email to [email protected] if requested.

  curl -v https://news.ycombinator.com

From my testing, HN has various anti-abuse features to prevent people from creating accounts to dodge bans or moderation penalties. E.g. if you create an account using Opera's VPN, your account's comments will all show up as [dead].

Perhaps they believe that there's no valid reason to use a VPN to check HN other than to dodge penalties. Either way, it's important to remember that we don't see the good things that come of choices like this.

(Or that it's just a random bug.)

That is misleading. We reply to almost all emails, and whenever we don't there is a specific reason. "Not feeling like it" doesn't enter into it. It is true that we sometimes get busy, but the email replies which that delays are the ones that require some careful thought. Straightforward issues like an IP blockage are easier to take care of right away.

Since you've repeatedly expressed upsetness that you haven't gotten a response to every email you've sent us—how many of those have there been?—and even pasted the texts of email correspondence into HN threads, I have to assume that this feeling is carrying into the comments that you're posting here. That's not ok, first because it leads to offtopic and unsubstantive posts, and now because you're misleading other users by giving them answers that carry an edge from your own unrelated experience. Please don't do that.

I meant, your time is finite, and you can't possibly respond to every email. It's not a slight against you. It's just a scaling problem. But yes, "if they don't feel like it, they won't respond" was a poor choice of words.

This is a bit of a tricky comment, since you've kind of forced me to say something, or to stay silent and accept your slight. But it's already a meta-thread, so maybe there's no harm.

It's a bit strange to drop some hints that my words shouldn't be taken at face value. I'll just note that (a) those you deem unworthy of a response have no idea why, and (b) the timespan we're talking about is either 1 month or 1 week, depending on how you want to look at the situation. Waiting a full week for a response to something that's been happening for a month seems pretty fair, no? I don't expect you to respond to every email, nor respond very often.

Lastly, the only reason I pasted those emails was to represent you accurately. You've often complained that people misrepresent your actions or act in bad faith, and I've seen this firsthand. I didn't want to do that to you in a public complaint. It was a gesture of goodwill, not malicious, though I see it could be taken the other way.

There's more that could be said, but trust me when I say I don't mean to be a thorn in your side.

Best.

In my experience, the response rate is 100%. Responses are thoughtful, professional, respectful, and even friendly, and they obviously read through even longer messages. It's probably the best customer service of any organization I patronize, besides my attorney who charges a bit more. Given the number of users, the size of the staff and, knowing HN, probably users' demanding nature, I'm impressed.

Now, do I get my 1,000 karma? :)

Not only that, but @dang's tears cure cancer. Sadly, @dang is so tough that he never cries! @dang has also counted to infinity. Twice! @dang can also strangle you to death with a cordless phone...

Hey, c'mon, you gotta admit, that cordless phone thing was pretty damn funny!