There's an inexplicably [dead] comment in reply to your comment here. I'm reposting it so more people can see it.
@throwaway4job, you appear to be hellbanned for no reason I can discern. :(
> throwaway4job 8 minutes ago [dead] [-]
> This isn't a viable approach for much of the hiring pool, as a majority of working engineers have contracts which explicitly forbid work for contract for other employers.
As such, if you hire any of those, you're hiring somebody with a proven willingness to ignore their contract, which is a strong anti-pattern.
> There's an inexplicably [dead] comment [...] I'm reposting it
Please don't do this. We created vouching for just this case and it works much better. To vouch for a [dead] comment (assuming your account has > 30 karma), click on its timestamp to go to its page, then click 'vouch' at the top.
Besides being distractingly off-topic, making a big deal out of [dead]ness confuses the thread when the comment does get vouched for and rescued, as typically happens for good but [dead] comments. For example, in this case the replies to throwaway4job's comment are now split across multiple places in the thread. We'll move them.
My guess to reasoning is that they called a startup founder a sociopath who would kill people to make a profit.
That said, that was a completely defensible and evidence-based thing to say in context (the founder threw a fit about regulators who wanted to know what the chances are that people would die), so unless HN is cracking down on the casual use of "sociopath" by people who aren't making professional medical diagnoses (which, to be fair, I do find objectionable, but not to the point of hellbanning), it seems like it was for no sensible reason.
It isn't always possible to figure out from the public data why an account is banned.
When a banned account's comment gets vouched for and rescued, we look at the account history and unban it if we see that we banned it unnecessarily (we try not to do that but it happens) or if the commenter has reformed. Alternatively, there may be a good reason for the account to stay banned, but if it posts good comments, HN users will vouch for and unkill those. This system has proven to work well, even better than we hoped when we introduced it.
@throwaway4job, you appear to be hellbanned for no reason I can discern. :(
> throwaway4job 8 minutes ago [dead] [-]
> This isn't a viable approach for much of the hiring pool, as a majority of working engineers have contracts which explicitly forbid work for contract for other employers. As such, if you hire any of those, you're hiring somebody with a proven willingness to ignore their contract, which is a strong anti-pattern.