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Luigi Mangione's account has been renamed on Stack Overflow
- Ma8ee 2y agoThe point raised about removing the attributions of Luigi Mangione is valid and important. I don't sympathise much with the authors whining about being suspended for upvoting Mangione's post, just because they were Mangione's.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago>I don't sympathise much with the authors whining about being suspended for upvoting Mangione's post, just because they were Mangione's. That's a bit hard to prove, no? How often does anyone look at the names of who posts what?
- Ma8ee 2y agoRead the post.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago>Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that". And you missed my main point. There will always be trolls. Now think about how many people just stumble on SO, find a good answer, and up vote it without realizing that person is a murderer. They may not even recall a name of whom they upvoted. Don't miss the forest of the trees if you don't wanna normalize social media taking action the law should (and is) doing.
- Ma8ee 2y agoThe post makes it clear that the author made the votes because of who wrote them. He did it intentionally and systematically. That was the reason to suspend the author. Reading before commenting saves everyone time, not only mine and yours, but everyone else’s that might stumble upon this thread.
- kwar13 2y agoWait... so you telling me they CAN moderate the content?
- IceDane 2y agoWelp. I guess that's it for the credibility of the SE folks, at least as far as I'm concerned.
- stackghost 2y agoIt's been an incredibly toxic place for years. I tried to ask questions 2 or 3 times only to be chastised by aggressive power users, or to have my posts immediately closed and locked for being "duplicates", even though they were not duplicates. After the fourth or fifth time I just gave up. It seems like a miserable experience; I can't imagine why anyone would spend time on SE.
- fracus 2y agoThis has been my experience since the last 5 years or so. I find the only responses I get to questions are lazy copy pasted.. "we need more info..", the same "power user" doing this on multiple questions even when the question didn't require more info to be provided. And then when you point this out you get a rude response and action. If you do provide the information, they never return. I don't think they have enough qualified people answering questions.
- monero-xmr 2y ago[flagged]
- ashoeafoot 2y agoinnocent?
- vkou 2y agoMr. Thompson was innocent in the same sense that a tiger, a lion, or some other dangerous predator is innocent.
- michaelsshaw 2y ago[flagged]
- rwyinuse 2y ago[flagged]
- monero-xmr 2y agoMurder is always wrong. Vigilante justice is wrong. Violence is wrong. Plenty of people, when put to a vote, would have the majority of society deem them “unethical”. If you want to put men to the sword based on a vote, pray you don’t get into the minority! Trump won the popular vote after all
- throwawaysleep 2y agoSeems prudent on the part of Stack Overflow to prevent it from turning into another politicized forum. I would bet Ross Ulbricht would be wiped clean if he became anywhere near as notorious by name/username.
- gizmo686 2y agoStack Overflow could have removed his content. Instead they chose to keep his content and just remove the attribution.
- gkoberger 2y agoThis case is such an interesting crossroads. He has such insane support — I went to two improv shows this past week where he was the crowd choice for a topic and the shows received insane applause. But what he did was objectively what we consider to be bad… in our society, vigilante justice (especially against nonviolent offenders) is considered to be wrong. I don’t know what SO should have done (well, probably not ban someone for asking questions, assuming we have the full story). But it’s so fascinating to see how companies have no playbook to work off of.
- xyzzyz 2y agoBut what he did was objectively what we consider to be bad… in our society, vigilante justice (especially against nonviolent offenders) is wrong. What are you talking about? What "vigilante justice"? The innocent victim, Brian Thompson, was murdered by a lunatic. He was not an offender. It was no justice.
- chimpanzee 2y agoJustice isn’t confined to the law. Nor to any one person’s opinion.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoBy some accounts Thompson was a killer of thousands.
- xyzzyz 2y agoUsing such a weasel phrase like "by some accounts" means that there's absolutely nothing standing behind this. If there was any concrete thing Brian Thompson did that was any kind of legal crime or moral error, you'd be able to name it.
- thowawatp302 2y agoI’m standing behind this. I think that Brian Thompson was a mass murderer. His actions as CEO put profit before people and caused many people’s lives to be lost.
- Mistletoe 2y agoI'm not even on the Luigi is a hero bandwagon at all, but this is weird. "Fear of a name only increases fear of the thing itself." -Hermione Granger
- javawizard 2y agoIn case any other Harry Potter nerds come along and worry their memory is completely failing them: Albums Dumbledore says this in the books. Hermione only has this quote in the movie adaptations.
- palmfacehn 2y ago>JK Rowling Airbrushed From Pop Culture Museum’s Harry Potter Display For “Transphobic Views” https://deadline.com/2023/08/jk-rowling-airbrushed-from-pop-culture-museum-harry-potter-display-for-alleged-transphobic-views-1235455925/ https://deadline.com/2023/08/jk-rowling-airbrushed-from-pop-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnatio_memoriae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnatio_memoriae
- oneeyedpigeon 2y agoYour Wikipedia link is very useful since it clarifies that Damnatio memoriae refers to exclusion "from official accounts".
- palmfacehn 2y ago>Today's best known examples of damnatio memoriae from antiquity concern chiselling stone inscriptions or deliberately omitting certain information from them. >The term is used in modern scholarship to cover a wide array of official and unofficial sanctions through which the physical remnants and memories of a deceased individual are destroyed. Certainly not exclusively from official accounts. Not sure what your point here is?
- immibis 2y agoWhy the scare quotes?
- eptcyka 2y agoGiven the mismatch between public sentiment and the reporting on all things Luigi Mangione, the establishment is really scared. Trying to scrub him from the internet is really sending a signal that we can influence the c-suite as a class the way Luigi Mangione did, which is incredibly stupid - they are ultimately inviting more murder.
- thanatos519 2y agoIndeed. It's like they are stomping on a burning bag of dog poo left on their doorstep: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/01/most-wanted-ceo/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/01/most-wanted-ceo/
- methou 2y ago[flagged]
- dpe82 2y agojwz has nothing if not opinions, and we love him for that.
- myvoiceismypass 2y agoFrustrating that we lazily have to still copy-paste jwz.org links in 2025. (DNA Pizza was one of my favorite things about living in SOMA in the before days)
- esperent 2y agoWarning on this link: visitors from HN will get served a nasty image instead of the article for some reason. Copy paste if you wanna view the article.
- tucnak 2y agoNasty image? This is poetry.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- 0xDEADFED5 2y agoDirtbag move to keep his content but erase his name
- madaxe_again 2y ago[flagged]
- bayindirh 2y ago[flagged]
- FireBeyond 2y agoThis is SE's modus operandi, protest their choices around AI training, policies, etc., by deleting your content and you'll get your account locked and your posts reinstated because you're "hurting the community" and that is more important than your (now non-exclusive) right to your own words (and by non-exclusive, I mean SE's wishes about what to do with your own words matters more than your wishes).
- immibis 2y agoMy account was locked for deleting my own comments. I sent them a GDPR request to delete my comments. They ignored it. I posted on meta asking if they followed GDPR. It was deleted and I was banned from meta.
- krick 2y agoActually, I don't think this is covered by GDPR, but if you are European (which is implied by the fact you invoke GPPR) you can and should file a GDPR complaint to your local DPA.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- self_awareness 2y agoIf you're handsome, even if you kill someone, you're still a hero.
- soulofmischief 2y agoActually it's the opposite. If he were "ugly" by society's standards, the difference is that Corpgov would have an easier time burying this because they could rely on programming people through generational propaganda that ugly people are less deserving of compassion or are more likely to be crazy or creepy. Instead, they're having trouble tarnishing his public perception and it scares them. Look no further than what Christians did to Jesus' image to see the effect in reverse. Now we're allowing the murder of babies and children in Jesus' hometown, because they don't look like the common Western perception of beauty, an effeminate white guy. Let's leave physical appearance or other trite observations out of it and have a real conversation about the issue at hand.
- self_awareness 2y ago> Actually it's the opposite [...], they're having trouble tarnishing his public perception and it scares them. Isn't this basically the same thing I wrote?
- soulofmischief 2y agoYour claim was that him being handsome absolves him of his crime to the public. My claim is that him being handsome only prevents Corpgov from successfully employing their typical associative propaganda. It's still up to the public to judge him as they see fit.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- self_awareness 2y agoAnd the public treats Luigi like he's a new Jesus. That's why Corpgov has a tougher time burying the case. Because he's handsome.
- d0mine 2y agotl;dr it seems your attribution on StackOverflow can be stripped without providing any reason. There may be several good reasons (eg to avoid spending time on cleaning up unrelated to SO issues due to the notoriety of the account) but none was communicated to the community.
- throwaway562if1 2y agoThere is a certain irony in this, given that such behaviour (demonstrating that rule of law applies only to the peons) is what has so inflamed the public in support of Mangione.
- wakawaka28 2y agoOk, show me a non-peon who shot a man in broad daylight and on video and didn't face the law afterward. Edit: I mean on purpose, obviously. Drunk driving hardly counts. (Nobody gets in a car drunk with the intention of hurting anyone, they are usually just trying to get from A to B.) Accidents don't count. We're talking about a comparable action here, something that meets the legal definition of murder and which was also not prosecuted. Deeds from war probably don't count because it doesn't meet the definition of murder under law (although, many war crimes and misdeeds abroad are punished) and soldiers are peons. Cops killing people on duty don't count because they aren't doing it unprovoked (when they do, it is usually prosecuted as murder), and they too are peons. Also, to the people complaining about the edits, sorry I can't reply to 50 comments all saying about the same kind of stuff. I keep hitting the rate limit.
- vintermann 2y agoDick Cheney comes to mind.
- calgoo 2y agoTechnically, Dick Cheney did shot someone in the face, now if it was an accident or not, who knows.
- calgoo 2y agoAs someone else mentioned Duck, I’ll add all the questionable police shootings that gets a slap on the wrist as the Police can be seen as the enforcers of the upper class / c-suite
- o11c 2y agoProbably the most common is drunk-driving "accidents"; cases for those seem to vanish all the time.
- HaZeust 2y agoThis entire song-and-dance from executives, media, platforms, and the general "status quo preservationists" over the last month in response to Luigi is priceless. They seem to have a high desire to place any disrespect they can on what seems to be an otherwise revered political activist in recent times; and it's only further fueling the discussion, and in all likelihood - probability for successors. They would have been smart to play a leveling field, to treat Luigi's act with an element of absurdity, which would cause everyday people to question if their relatability towards Luigi was warranted or even made sense. Instead, they played a hand that the fearful would - because they are, and only validated the vigilante's narrative - because it is.
- anigbrowl 2y agoAdministrators reflexively lie. They are committed to preserving whatever institution employs them, not to any objective standard of truth or behavior. I have lost count of how many times I have highlighted such behavior over the alst decade.
- HaZeust 2y agoMe as well, but instead highlighting their lack of commitment to morals and integrity; rather than standard of truth or behavior - equally valid take, mind you!
- beefnugs 2y agoI find it hilarious that they can't even keep their power in check to save it for when it would REALLY matter... but they just cant help themselves, they love to execute the control as quickly as it is available even though this leaves a trail of erosion. An obvious worldwide trend of complete speech control, right in the open for all of us to follow and see. Instead of just waiting a bit longer... until there was no way to stop it (maybe its already too late?) But i feel like this is too soon to pull this trigger, we still have time to stop using all these large platforms that aren't even vital to our lives, to make open and peer to peer alternatives
- chongli 2y agoLying to preserve an institution is like playing Jenga: eroding the foundation in order to scale up the tower.
- stevage 2y agoPeople really need to stop contributing to StackOverflow.
- hipadev23 2y agotbh I'm surprised stackexchange still has employees. I thought all that value was already extracted by LLM scrapers and they're well on their way to becoming another quora.
- paul7986 2y ago[flagged]
- paul7986 2y ago[flagged]
- yetihehe 2y agoDownvote doesn't always mean "I don't agree with you", it sometimes means "your argument is flawed". The CEO is not "just a cog". CEO is a PERSON who choses to do things in some way and enforces that way on the rest of organisation. CEO - chief executive officer. Chief - means here "the most important one"[0]. Executive - "someone in a high position, especially in business, who makes decisions and puts them into action"[1]. Officer - he has authority[2]. I agree that he did not deserve murder. But he was a person who was the most responsible for whole organization. If he wasn't the one who wanted to deny people their care that they paid for, he should quit. He didn't, so he agreed to take all the blame for telling others what to do. [0] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/chief https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/chief [1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/executive https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/executiv... [2] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/officer https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/officer
- Philpax 2y agoIf a CEO of the largest health insurer is "a cog in the wheel", who isn't?
- paul7986 2y agoHe was not the CEO of United HealthCare this guy is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Witty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Witty . He was a CEO of one of it's divisions. Do you know someone personally that Brian Thompson killed or you are just jumping on a bandwagon wanting socialistic healthcare for all Americans. That may be a good thing but get ready to pay 50% to 60% of wages to the govt and Americans as a society are tax averse compared to Europeans who are used to paying high taxes. Its not an easy change for Americans to embrace and of course healthcare is expensive but so is becoming a doctor and the student loan debt that comes with it. Doctors and medical professional definitely need to be paid these high salaries. It is a very complex issue but cheering a murderer on is a break down of society.
- smt88 2y agoA lot of terminally online people in these comments are dramatics overestimating popular support for Mangione. It is certainly remarkable that a murderer has such a high approval rating, but he's still not close to being broadly popular. > "Americans are twice as likely to view Luigi Mangione — who was charged with the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson — very or somewhat unfavorably (43%) than favorably (23%)." https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/51189-presidential-pardons-billionaires-and-luigi-mangione-december-15-17-2024-economistyougov-poll https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/51189-presidentia...
- cbozeman 2y agoTrusting the system that's directly under attack to be honest about the effectiveness and popularity of the attacker of the system... You know in the legends of Robin Hood, Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham also downplay the threat Robin poses to their status quo.
- smt88 2y agoSo you think YouGov is part of the same "system" as UnitedHealth?
- cocacola1 2y ago23% – Favorable/Somewhat Favorable 37% – Don't Know 43% – Unfavorable/Somewhat Unfavorable That might as well be broad popularity for murder of all things. That don't know number is wild.
- lelandfe 2y agoThis actually had the opposite effect on me; I had no clue his support was this acute among young demographics. Only 29% of those age 18-29 view a murderer unfavorably, whereas 39% view him favorably and 32% aren't sure. It's break even for 30–44. The support is heavily skewed by older age ranges (just 5% of >65). If those age ranges were further broken out by political ideology it seems like it would be overwhelming for young liberals, since the all age "very liberal" has 47% support to 30% disapproval. If your poll is to be believed, it isn't an online phenomenon at all.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoWhat a bonkers move by stack exchange. The new username: "user4616250" is ringing a bell... Didn't 4chan used to give everyone names like anon4616250? It's got real V-for-vendetta vibes.
- gschizas 2y agoI don't know if it's in any way relevant, but IMDB has the movie "The perfect weapon" under that id (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4616250/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4616250/)
- seabass-labrax 2y agoOr it could be a reference to the Portuguese patrol ship Viana Do Castelo, which has that very registration number! I think there are so many numerical ID schemes in use that you'd be able to find something relevent for any large number.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoPerhaps, but can you find something more relevant than The Perfect Weapon?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tazjin 2y ago> It’s important to grasp the severity of my suspension: suspending a professional resource for one year will create a hardship for me Why? You can still get information from there, they're stopping you from working for free for them for some time.
- alkonaut 2y agoYou can't ask a question. And even if you could start a new account, you wouldn't have thousands of rep points to spend on bounties, so the answers won't be as good or quick.
- p0w3n3d 2y agoSimilar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.
- AxelLuktarGott 2y agoliterally 1984
- mindslight 2y agoIt's well into January, meaning it's time we stop talking about Luigi and take down the tree. We can start back up again next November. I mean, he is effectively the modern Krampus for our world of badly behaving CEOs, right?
- fracus 2y agoHaving read the article it seems to me that scrubbing his name from the site was an act of vigilantism, which highlights the danger of vigilantism.
- Aloha 2y ago[flagged]
- llm_trw 2y ago[flagged]
- suggeststrongid 2y ago> killed millions Can this be substantiated?
- saikia81 2y agoAnd what if the system doesn't work? Your argument has the presupposition that the political system is a working democracy. Stability, and security are not a given for all.
- jl6 2y agoEvery talking head believes the system doesn’t work. Trump just got elected largely on a platform of claiming the current system isn’t working. What are we supposed to do, switch from democracy to vigilante murder as a system of government?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- savemangione 2y agoAnd yet the US were created by bloody revolution, preserved by bloody civil war, and made prosperous by countless bloody coups, wars, etc. Perhaps the problem is that democracy isn't really any different than any other form of country-level government. Perhaps we lost for ever when our ancestors started founding cities a few thousand years ago.
- ZeroGravitas 2y agoMaybe they are right, the current system doesn't work, and the answer is to switch to democracy? Plenty of sensible policies have popular support in America and have done for a while. Americans are not as dumb as their politics would suggest.
- ProllyInfamous 2y agoYou obviously haven't driven behind my Camry (sporting a Luigi plushdoll and bumper sticker proclaiming "PATRON SAINT OF DENIALS"). Nothing but mostly smiles... except from "dad" who warns police might hassle me. "I'm forty, pops;" I'm now also old, too. For context, I have zero dependents, dropped out of medical school pre-ACA, and do not carry health insurance (USA, boo!).
- mmaunder 2y agoIs it legally feasible to fork StackOverflow and create a competing platform using the same content? Or is the license just window dressing to provide contributors with the feeling that they could do that if they wanted to... but not really.
- cyco130 2y agoI think it’s a seriously good idea. I believe they could create problems during the content scraping phase but considering that Internet Archive has most of the content already, I don’t see how they could legally prevent such a move if you’re careful with their trademarks and other intellectual properties like logos and look-and-feel.
- palmfacehn 2y agoThere are many sites that rehash popular questions from Stack Overflow and other Q and A sites. I regard the scraped content as search spam. Of course, there isn't the same ideological motive behind it. I imagine that SO retains some kind of IP rights to their content.
- manquer 2y agoLegally? yes. The users own the content, SO only has a license to do as they please and users have already given CC license to anyone (that is the nature of copyleft after all). Is it feasible to build a community that will contribute, and also get the search traffic[1], and be economically viable, particularly in the post LLM world? I don't think so. In today's world with gen AI, the drive to contribute and maintain suck knowledge stores is simply not there, SO itself is facing a > 60% drop in new questions even as far as 2 years back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38984742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38984742 (2023). The tech itself is pretty trivial, even distributed and truly community operated like Wikis are, content creation will be the biggest challenge and i don't see the strong community motivation to maintain knowledge bases like this anymore. [1] Search engines will negatively penalize the domain for just hosting duplicated content without any extra intent to stifle a new player etc.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
- mc3301 2y agoThere's even ghibli fan art of Luigi: <https://www.instagram.com/totorotuesday/p/DD9oL9oTm3V/?hl=en https://www.instagram.com/totorotuesday/p/DD9oL9oTm3V/?hl=en>
- agnishom 2y agoOf course, people, whether criminals or not, should be attributed for their intellectual contributions but there is a bigger point here which people do not say enough: The criminal justice system already wields the responsibility of punishing criminals. Let the convicts go through due process and do their time. The rest of the society should not participate in "delivering justice": obviously not by hitting them or torturing them, but also not by taking away their property or social capital.
- MoreMoore 2y ago[flagged]
- agnishom 2y agoThat's not really what I am talking about.
- Febra33 2y ago[flagged]
- ImHereToVote 2y ago[flagged]
- dang 2y agoPlease don't post in the flamewar style, and please edit out swipes like "what are you talking about" from your posts here. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- MoreMoore 2y agoI don't really understand the issue. They say that people have a legal system if they're wronged by these companies. And it's clear that the legal system isn't an option for normal people when a company like UHS denies claims. So I want to know what they're talking about and why they think the justice system is sufficient as it is today to help normal people. Seriously. I want to know what they're talking about. The justice system they're stating exists simply does not. It has nothing to do with a flame war. That's an unfair characterisation, particularly when people's lives are so deeply affected when they can't get the care they need because of their insurance company. Or have you been bought and paid for too?
- backoverflow 2y agoStack Overflow's rules for bounties [0] discourage promotional bounties but do not state that bounties cannot be given to the same user or on the basis of the user as opposed to a user's answers. Stack Overflow failed to enunciate their own rules (or - let's be honest - imagined new rules after the fact), blamed you for breaking non-existent rules, sent you an obviously mostly copy/paste suspension notice (the bit about secondary accounts seems bizarre and non sequitur), and gas-lit you with the imaginary claim that you cannot vote on a post you already voted on which for whatever reason hadn't been logged. FWIW also a high-rep SO user and had to create a burner account in case there's retribution. We shouldn't have to hide ourselves just to talk sanely. SO is right to try to protect the bounty system from unintended uses, but not to make rules up on the fly and enforce them heavy-handedly and retrospectively, suspending someone for breaking non-existent rules. Stack Overflow should make rules for bounties and make them crystal clear and unsuspend you. Can they admit they're wrong - will they do this? Of course not. [0] https://stackoverflow.com/help/bounty#:~:text=Users%20may%20only%20have%20three,100%20reputation%20(not%2050) https://stackoverflow.com/help/bounty#:~:text=Users%20may%20....
- croemer 2y agoA warning would have been absolutely sufficient, at most a very short term ban but given there was no harm being done currently and the rules weren't even clear no ban is justified. I am aware of vote fraud and it's ok that SO warns/suspends if one engages in it. In this case it arguably does. However it needs to be a proportionate response to the action, and not done as retaliation. I'm also a fairly high reputation SO contributor (in current rankings top 150).
- fabian2k 2y agoThis specific user has a very long history on SO and the rest of the network. You have to assume that this history might have played a part in the decision to suspend instead of only warning.
- DangitBobby 2y ago
- rollulus 2y agoFor people out of the loop like me (the article doesn’t mention it): Luigi Mangione is an American man who was identified as the suspect in the killing of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare.
- cratermoon 2y agoIt's a shame there is no context for who Mangione even is, at the linked post or here. People are expected to just know. But not a word. Silence. Sloppy work, terrible writing. Nobody could spare one minute to write, "Mangione was charged in the case of the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson", or something like it? Is it taboo to even use the words murder or assassination in this context?
- shusaku 2y agoThis isn’t a news article, it’s someone’s blog. They’re under no obligation to write background for the off chance that their post gets aggregated for an unfamiliar audience.
- pcthrowaway 2y agoDon't get me started on articles which dissect the latest tweet by Donald Trump without adding context like "former and upcoming President of the U.S." for those who aren't chronically online. /s because Poe's Law (Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture which says that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, any parodic or sarcastic expression of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of those views)
- eigenblake 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect?wprov=sfla1
- zjp 2y ago[flagged]
- tossandthrow 2y agoDepending on your situation there is a chance you absolutely should inherit no revolutionary spirit - ie. if you are a part of 1) a wealthy family or 2) the PE game - given this is HN, there is a good chance of that being the case.
- voxl 2y agoI doubt anything would give you a "revolutionary spirit." As such a spirit is almost necessarily violent if it's serious at all.
- dang 2y agoPlease don't post in the flamewar style to HN, regardless of how bad someone else is or you feel he is. You may not owe schizo psychos better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- zjp 2y agoYou are correct and I've adjusted the comment since it is not delete-able afaict.
- maeil 2y agoThe assumption here I'm seeing by some of the naysayers that US Law in 2025 is a good arbiter of ethics, morality or justness is something I'd like to touch on. I wonder if those people also believe this to have been the case before Civil Rights. Or even in the slavery era. Slaveholders were just law-abiding citizens! Slaves trying to escape were the scoundrels! If not, then surely you can see how there's no way that "back then, the execution of US law was awful, but now in 2025, it's wonderful and should always be treated as delivering justice". Come on now. It's just as flawed now, just in different ways. Which means just like in the Jim Crow era, you can't use the US execution of law as an arbiter of justness, ethics, morals, and what will improve society. Absolutely not. Everyone who has such tendencies certainly has people they look up to who are murderers. They've definitely voted for them. Lifted from another comment [1]: "I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for the law." - Martin Luther King, Jr. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42642740 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42642740
- esperent 2y ago> Come on now. It's just as flawed now, just in different ways I'm not from the US so I try to avoid having strong opinions on US issues... But is it really just as flawed now? I mean, there's no slavery anymore, there's women's rights, and all races are legally equal (even if in reality it doesn't work out that way). This seems like an improvement, despite massive flaws still existing.
- perlgeek 2y agoA charitable interpretation of OP's statement would be: You cannot really use lawfulness as a measure of morality, and this is true now just as much as it was back then. Or a different take could be: moral progress happens all the time, but the law often lags behind, so the delta between our moral ideas and the law is just as big as it has been in the past.
- maeil 2y ago
- bigbacaloa 2y ago[dead]
- sky2224 2y agoI read Luigi's answers on his SO account. They are awful. Granted though, he likely wrote these answers when he was about 16 years old. With that said: his content is on there under the presumption of CC, it should remain.
- firefoxd 2y agoYet, my ex co-worker who has been convicted of murder and is serving life without possibility of parole has his account untouched [0]. It's surprising because his case was all over the news and tabloids. Not so Fun fact: a second coworker, from the same company, different crime, has also been convicted and is serving 14 years. (Victim died when police shot the wrong person). His stack overflow account is still up. [0]: https://stackoverflow.com/users/968075/gareth-pursehouse https://stackoverflow.com/users/968075/gareth-pursehouse
- treyfitty 2y agoThis must have been a helluva company to work for.
- croemer 2y agoThat must be Internet Brands, of WebMD fame, then?
- firefoxd 2y agoWait til you see how they asked employees to comeback to the office... https://www.vice.com/en/article/dont-mess-with-us-webmd-parent-company-demands-return-to-office-in-bizarre-video/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/dont-mess-with-us-webmd-pare...
- mulmen 2y ago[flagged]
- jdmoreira 2y agoAh yes. php of course
- ChocolateGod 2y agoHe needs a filesystem named after him too.
- 2y ago
- barrenko 2y ago[flagged]
- ithkuil 2y agoI think your anger is deeply misplaced. Profiteering on the lives of other people is morally repugnant so it's very natural for human beings to be angry at people who are directly involved and thus bear some responsibility. The anger is natural but fundamentally it misses the mark. Given the mechanism of american healthcare there will be millions of denied claims even if all the profit of the insurance would be reinvested and all employees including the CEO would be volunteering. While that would absolve the CEO from the moral responsibility of profiteering it wouldn't improve the lives of the many people whose claims must be denied because of the mechanics of the heath insurance system. Given the current system, the insurances must stay afloat and if the bankrupt that will affect even more lives. Furthermore, hospitals have a different set of incentives which are not aligned with reducing the pressure on the healthcare insurer. You could say "but the government should not allow that and it should just bail out the heath care insurers that go bankrupt in order to save lives". Yes you could say that. Would they? Should somebody try that? Should some CEO of a major healthcare insurer be brave enough and bankrupt the company they're supposed to manage just to force the hand of the government to fundamentally prove that healthcare is a public good? Should a CEO be shot for not risking everything to force the government hand? Or should a politician get shot because they didn't improve health care when they could have? Which politician? Every politician? Only the top level ones? How time we would give them to make the change? One term? Two terms? Punish them when they retire after not having fixed the healthcare? Despite all the power that the people have on paper, democracies are only as good as the public discourse that unfolds in such democracies. Do we really think that we can solve problems as complex as healthcare by shorting at whoever our ape brain thinks is the most proximal responsible person? It's not like the world isn't full of examples of countries where healthcare is approached as a public good from the ground up. There are plenty of places where you also have private healthcare on top of that. Why don't you just take the opportunity to push for actual reform. Siding with a murderer is not going to help your cause.
- anarticle 2y agoRight, the problem is we have been voting, donating, and protesting since occupy. I need things to change within the time that I am alive. If anything things have regressed, and some really strong feelings (I know this is strange to the beep boops of HN! It's so irrational!) are being expressed right now because people are at their end. Irrational is tens of thousands / hundreds of thousands over time of Americans losing the game over health issues. What I am getting at here, is if the model is to "let the unproductive ones die" then say so, and we can accelerate getting rid of insurance. If you're a turbo capitalist, then the real issue is price discovery, insurance companies create false price signal due to the variance in payouts and hospitals mask their pricing. We can blame both sides maybe, but it is clear insurance has some explaining to do before we completely eliminate them. They do not need a third boat. I need to keep my house. I will also anecdotally mention that NO ONE that I know is against Luigi. Not even once has someone said "well that guy had a wife and kids". It's not personal, it's not about him. In their view, it is a wakeup call because no amount of protesting, voting, and donating has gotten progress in the direction they want in their life time. Not even a sliver of a debate among about 5 different friend groups, 4 of which are not in tech.
- h_tbob 2y ago[flagged]
- dudeinjapan 2y ago[flagged]
- dang 2y agoWe've banned this account for repeatedly posting flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- thomassmith65 2y agoThe tone of this blogpost is over the top. I mean... The *erasure* of Luigi Mangione The saga on Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange, *and how tech always serves the ruling class.* or It’s important to *grasp the severity* of my suspension: suspending a professional resource for one year will create a hardship for me. And, I’m one of the largest producers of content on the network We're not talking about the Department of Defense, or the Catholic Church. StackOverflow is just a popular Q&A website. Since it's popular with the software development community, it's of some importance - not enough to merit using the tone of Woodward and Bernstein or John Rawls.
- shagie 2y agoTo your point of: "... suspending a professional resource for one year will create a hardship for me. And, I’m one of the largest producers of content on the network ..." https://stackoverflow.com/users/124486/evan-carroll?tab=answers&sort=newest https://stackoverflow.com/users/124486/evan-carroll?tab=answ... Evan is only suspended on Stack Overflow. Compare https://stackoverflow.com/users/124486/evan-carroll https://stackoverflow.com/users/124486/evan-carroll and https://dba.stackexchange.com/users/2639/evan-carroll https://dba.stackexchange.com/users/2639/evan-carroll ... or for that matter any of the other parts: https://stackexchange.com/users/42701/evan-carroll?tab=accounts https://stackexchange.com/users/42701/evan-carroll?tab=accou... Likewise, the "largest producers" ... https://stackoverflow.com/users/124486/evan-carroll?tab=answers&sort=newest https://stackoverflow.com/users/124486/evan-carroll?tab=answ... and https://stackoverflow.com/users/124486/evan-carroll?tab=questions&sort=newest https://stackoverflow.com/users/124486/evan-carroll?tab=ques... would bring that into question. Even on the site with the highest rep... https://dba.stackexchange.com/users/2639/evan-carroll?tab=answers&sort=newest https://dba.stackexchange.com/users/2639/evan-carroll?tab=an... the most recent answer was August 12th. The next most recent answer was October 1st (of 2023). The self-aggrandizement and over the top tone does not do any favors for taking the content seriously.
- Simon_O_Rourke 2y agoI have a feeling this action will only have a Streisand effect. Personally I didn't know he was on Stack Overflow until I saw this. Had the mods left it alone I suspect it wouldn't have become more than some minor news or comment.
- harry8 2y agoLet's move this away from Mr Mangione's direct example and consider what appropriate policy should be where serious crime gathers attention. Somebody publishes their thoughts contributing to how the world should be in their view on the internet. We all do that, me here. They are then accused and arrested for a horrible crime. Murder, for example. This garners their thoughts a great deal more attention than they would otherwise get as now they are (in)famous. No removal of publication until conviction. Is there now an incentive to advertise your views by committing crime to attract as much attention as possible? Easiest way is to make it as horrific as possible. I am thinking extremist racists will take those rules. More than one of them. More than once. So now we're somewhere pretty uncomfortable. I think it wrong to suppress Osama Bin Laden's screeds recently removed from the Guardian online, however much I loathe him and everything he stood for. So what about some neo-nazi mass murderer? Or the copycat? Or the following ten? Is that really so hypothetical that we can't see a body count with it? Is this alarm-ism? I hope so, I genuinely do and have no hidden motive here. I'm not buying that this situation has easy policy nor that whatever is done results in something we are going to be fully comfortable with. One outcome may be very much worse for many more people than another, so thinking it through fully is really needed. Something I am yet to make much more than this vague start. Online publishing policy seems like a relevant framing.
- _Algernon_ 2y agoThis has video-games-cause-violence vibes. People don't become mass murderers because they read a comment on the internet.
- harry8 2y agoNope, wrong cause direction. Do people never become mass killers to get attention? Does giving mass killers more attention, making them famous affect anything, maybe encourage more? "No" is a reasonable response if you can support it.
- _Algernon_ 2y agoYou know what the actual biggest difference between countries with large amounts of mass killings and those that don't is? Gun control. Luigi Mangione's comments on stack overflow don't even register in terms of violence caused. These kinds of removals are simply attempts at information control by the elite, and -- assuming you're not part of the 1% -- you're playing straight into their hand. "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." - Karl Marx
- fedeb95 2y agoThe power of a name alone... given his StackOverflow contents aren't relevant to his murder. Damnatio memoriae again?
- oytis 2y agoIs it a glitch of my memory or has the headline been edited? I thought the policy on HN was to use original headlines.
- dang 2y agoNot a glitch! We edited it. But you're slightly mistaken about about the policy. It is "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Note that "unless". The second clause is as important as the first! "The erasure of Luigi Mangione" is a linkbait headline because it drastically inflates the scope of the article. Therefore we changed it, in accordance with the guidelines, using a representative phrase from the article body.
- Febra33 2y ago[flagged]
- Dwedit 2y agoReiserFS stayed around in the Linux Kernel for years after the murder he committed. Yes I know that Hans is not the sole developer.
- solarkraft 2y agoPeople keep rediscovering the streisand effect. Nothing would have happened if they hadn’t done this.
- oliwarner 2y agoEvan drowns a good point in his own drama. I've moderated against him on a Stack Exchange site before and it's tedious how far he can push the limits. He knows the rules, the process, what's expected, and he knows how lowly moderators react when they the system alerts them to infractions. It's no surprise he's earned himself [another] suspension here. But as a moderator, what the company is doing here is ridiculous and a seemingly flagrant abuse of license. If you take contributions under CC-BY-SA, you damned-well keep the attribution unless the contributor wants to be disassociated from it. If you don't want to be associated with a contributor, delete the account, and the content. You can't pick and choose.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago"You can't pick and choose." Perhaps you can if the licensor is incarcerated and unwilling to enforce the license.
- maccard 2y agoI have no experience with the writer of this post, but: > You can't pick and choose. Yes you can, when your goal is to stir the pot.
- paulryanrogers 2y agoThe argument isn't over what is possible for the powerful. It's about what is right and just.
- immibis 2y agoWhy should the powerful care about what's right and just? (One reason is part of the title of this post)
- paulryanrogers 2y agoBecause if enough of the powerless people agree on what is right, then they may act on that collectively. That could threaten the rich's hold on power.
- sklivvz1971 2y agoJust a hunch that this could be a mistake of an overzealous community mod that thought that the nick Luigi Mangione was a troll... and that Evan Carroll is the best troll on the Stack Exchange network and he pushed the situation as he does and simply had the opposite effect than he thought he would ("Evan Carroll is flamebaiting again? There's no real problem, give him one year suspension" instead of "Oi, did someone make a mistake here here?") Of course, I can be totally wrong but I've seen these things happen (I've been both a mod and a core dev at Stack closely working with the community team 8 years ago)
- EvanCarroll 2y agoYou can't be the best troll, if you never troll: I never troll, ever. But other than that. Luigi's acct wasn't renamed by a community mod, from Zoe and as quoted in the article > I can confirm SE, Inc. were the ones to clear his name. A reason was not specified anywhere obvious. Mods have been given explicit instructions not to touch that profile. While this particular incident may be limited to SO, the implications of this affect the entire network
- rajnathani 2y agoWhile this isn't a good thing, the fact that it was Luigi's account would've maybe caused some people to upvote his answers and questions just as-is now and thus would've artificially inflated his account's points. Thus, maybe freezing his account would've been a better thing to do (if possible to freeze upvotes/votes too)?
- datavirtue 2y agoWell, here comes Barbara.
- Qem 2y agoI wonder what will be the next move to airbrush the guy from history. Will Nintendo change the name of Mario's brother? Is there some entity that enforces Creative Commons? That seems a blatant violation of CC-BY-SA by Stack Overflow.
- ripped_britches 2y agoUnfortunately it seems like a lot of the patriotic stories us Americans were taught in school were to violently overthrow your unjust oppressors (not to mention film). Not surprising that his story resonates with some of the public.
- kridsdale1 2y agoThe good guys in Star Wars were based on the Viet Cong.
- tasuki 2y agoI find it funny the post explains what stack overflow is (which I know) while not explaining who Luigi Mangione is (which I don't know).
- spiffytech 2y agoLuigi is accused of last month's high-profile murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson.
- scotty79 2y agoI can't comprehend the reason for account deletions. I'm sure there are plenty of convicted killers or even worse people with accounts. Why would that matter? It has nothing to do with the service these sites provide.
- shagie 2y agoI see this as a trade off for moderation. The question for this could be rephrased as "which takes less moderation?" Option 1 is moderating the votes, voting reversals, and bounty reversals... or changing the user name so that it's less visible? The tools for doing the moderation of personal votes and reversals and whatnot are blunt and clumsy and time consuming. The tools for doing the "change the account name" is similarly blunt and clumsy, but much less time consuming. From a mod perspective, it isn't necessarily "what is right or wrong" but rather "what do I have time to do? ... and if I don't have time to do this, what are the outcomes?" There is a lot of "the tools for doing (diamond) moderation haven't been built out well" combined with "the stance of Stack Exchange Inc (I specify it this way to distinguish between Stack Exchange the community) has been inconsistent on social issues in the past." Running a social network (but not wanting to admit its a social network, and sometimes denying that it is, but having engagement metrics like a social network) with a diminishing paid moderation team combined with taking stances that haven't been run past a lawyer before a proclamation or actions being taken... and then as often as not going back on (or not following through with) those actions or proclamations... And we've got problems. The actions themselves may not be of Stack Exchange Inc's direction actions this time, but the underlying confusion and lack of communication of clear policies (and lack of enforcement of the clear policies), or the tools to allow for less blunt actions... well... we've got problems. I don't see this getting better as Stack Exchange Inc has taken very little action to increase the paid moderation team or take responsibility for the content that is published on their sites.
- asdefghyk 2y agoaccount renamed and not even convicted yet ..... The slow walk on the pier is an example of the upcoming ?revenge? by the ?establishment?
- EvanCarroll 2y agoHere is my response to the post on Hacker News. https://substack.evancarroll.com/p/hacker-news-where-the-billionaires https://substack.evancarroll.com/p/hacker-news-where-the-bil...
- shagie 2y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22159031 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22159031 > HN has a an automated simple proxy for flame-war detection. One characteristic of flame-wars is that people get into a to'n'fro over the issue, and the number of comments balloons. However, no one else is really interested, so they don't upvote the submisson, and the participants can only upvote a submission once, so the number of points doesn't increase. > Result is that a simply proxy for a flame-war is the number of comments on a submission out-stripping the number of votes. > A side-effect of that is that if there's a mildly interesting submission that lots of people comment on, but very few upvote, then the flame-war penalty will be triggered, and the submission will sink like a stone, never to be seen again. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16020089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16020089 > Scott and I get emailed every time that software trips so we can quickly look at which threads are being penalized and reverse the penalty when it isn't helpful. The only time we don't do that is when we're sleeping. > We tend to call it the 'overheated discussion detector' these days, since it detects more than flamewars. However, that phrase is more awkward to say than 'flamewar detector'. If anyone can come up with a better name I'd love to hear it. > Turning that software off is not an option, because HN would be overwhelmingly more dominated by flamewars if we did so. It's not primarily the individual threads that I fear, it's the systemic effects of having them be more dominant. HN exists most of all for the quieter, deeper, more out-of-the-way finds that would be the first to get excluded under such a regime. That would really be an existential risk to HN. > Incidentally, that last point generalizes. When people complain that we don't do X, for some obvious X, it isn't because we don't value X (e.g. free speech or whatnot). It's because we're worried about systemic effects. --- Quite simply said, the post and comments got overheated and looked like flame wars and so was pushed off the to have it cool down.
- treebeard901 2y agoWhat was it in 1984? Memory holed? Now you can Fahrenheit 451 everyone if they go against the established order.
- stanislavb 2y agoWhy is the title of the post changed? I thought that's against the guidelines.
- immibis 2y agoThe rules only apply to the little people.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoI don't know if this is valid, but thr guidelines do state that you can slightly editorialize any title that comes off as clockbait.
- krick 2y ago> And, I’m one of the largest producers of content on the network (by any measure I’m in the top 0.1% of members) I mean... wow. This is not the point of course, but the point is obvious and public sentiment towards SO seems to be quite unanimous. And, to be fair, I suppose 0.1% of SO is quite a lot of people, but still. I don't think SO will do well behaving like that.