HN likes to go on tears about some big service hurting some little entrepreneur via random, unexplained mistreatment. And yet, most of the time, these stories turn out to involve blatant breaking of terms of use. At this point, whenever I see these stories, I assume that I'm reading a self-serving account by someone who knows exactly what they did wrong, and then I look for any sign that this isn't the case.

It's gotten a little better over time, at least. There was a point, years back, where it seemed like every other day there was a front-page post by some guy running a linkfarm complaining that Google had mysteriously and unjustly weakened their God-given search rankings.