Yeah. My idea isn't great, just a frustrated response to this person who claims to have been here for a long time yet still feels it's appropriate to make offensive posts about others here.

I like the idea of an incubation period, but I've seen valuable comments posted from new accounts- I bet a ton of people lurk for months before seeing a thread they feel they can make a valuable contribution to.

You may allow them to contribute - just make them work a little for it. Trolls are lazy - they won't go through a captcha just to harass other people - they'll go to Digg instead. And those who use throwaway logins to troll are also cowards, who don't want to be exposed as who they really are. We can work with that too.

We don't have (or, really, want) to prevent the use of quasi-anonymous logins. All we need is to make life more miserable to trolls than they make it for everyone else. With enough frustration, trolls will gravitate towards places where they can sublimate their frustrations more easily and, hopefully, leave HN for those who really want to engage in civil conversation.

What do you gain from being rude?

And how does it feel when you get negative karma?

Where can I get one of these "advanced CS degrees" in black-hat trolling?

I do have a CS degree, but I must have missed those classes.