--- title: Canceling "Hey" | daily.dev description: A long-time Hey email client customer explains why they cancelled their subscription after discovering DHH published an article comparing Roma people to wolves... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/canceling-hey--olqdm6g8w twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Canceling "Hey" | daily.dev og:description: A long-time Hey email client customer explains why they cancelled their subscription after discovering DHH published an article comparing Roma people to wolves... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/canceling-hey--olqdm6g8w og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/oLqdM6G8W.png og:image:alt: Canceling "Hey" og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Canceling "Hey" **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 7 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A long-time Hey email client customer explains why they cancelled their subscription after discovering DHH published an article comparing Roma people to wolves and advocating for mass deportations. The author critiques DHH's reasoning on factual grounds, arguing that individuated enforcement is a fairer and more practical alternative to collective punishment, and that DHH's framing notably lacks any acknowledgment that Roma individuals could be innocent or contribute positively to society. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 241 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-07-27). **TL;DR:** The HN community is largely critical of DHH's Roma blog post, viewing it as racist or at minimum deeply problematic, though a minority defend DHH's framing as a legitimate concern about public-space behavior rather than ethnic animus. The thread quickly sprawls into debates about homelessness, individual agency vs. structural racism, and whether the cancellation post itself is hypocritical. **Sentiment:** 10% positive · 35% mixed · 55% skeptical **The case for** - The author's decision to cancel is seen as a principled, non-confrontational way to act on one's values without 'shouting or shaming.' - Several commenters note that DHH's pattern of behavior over years provides sufficient evidence to justify the reaction rather than continued benefit of the doubt. - The article's argument for 'individuated enforcement' over collective punishment is endorsed as the legally and morally coherent position. **The pushback** - Some commenters argue the post is itself hypocritical—framing a public call-out as 'not shaming' while using the cancellation as a thin cover for political commentary. - A minority contend DHH's post was about illegal immigrants or park-campers specifically, not all Roma, and that the 'deport them' sentence is genuinely ambiguous. - Others argue the author engages in false equivalence by ignoring that Roma in Denmark are largely EU citizens with legal residency, undermining the 'illegal immigrant' framing DHH's defenders use. - One commenter suggests the post is 'virtue signaling' about a complex communal-welfare situation the author has little direct experience with. **By community** - hackernews (mixed): Majority condemn DHH's framing as racist dog-whistling with a long pattern of far-right sympathy, but a vocal minority dispute the characterization and debate the ambiguity of his wording, while the thread drifts into broader arguments about homelessness, race, and individual agency. **Hottest debate:** Whether DHH's 'deport them' sentence targets all Roma as an ethnic group or only those illegally occupying public spaces—and whether the surrounding context removes any genuine ambiguity. **Open questions** - Are the Roma individuals DHH references actually illegal immigrants or EU citizens with legal residency rights in Denmark? - Is there a meaningful distinction between DHH's position and standard European far-right rhetoric, or is the framing genuinely novel? - What ethical email alternatives exist that are free of comparable controversies (Proton/Mullvad concerns were raised but not resolved)? **Highlights** > tl;dr: it uses a slur for roma (most of them probably eu citizens), puts them in the wolf slot against danes as sheep, and pairs "shoot them" with "deport them" as matched remedies, an ethnic group as predator, with no individuals in view. > — [franze on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49073617) > This is slightly less awful than what I imagined but still enough that I would never want to do do business with any company run by DHH anymore. Granted, I already have a dim view of Ruby and Ruby on Rails, and have never used any of DHH's software products, so my comment is a moral denouncement that carries no weight. Still, the dog whistling in this blog post is so loud I hear barking from the next door down. I don't exactly have on-the-ground knowledge of the exact situation in Copenhagen, but even just from what DHH describes, I'm pretty sure the solution can be solved through means less invasive than deporting homeless people. And just to be clear, I'm using the phrase "homeless people" rather than Europe's N-word because the problem is not where the people came from. Unless you want to pretend like Danish-born homeless are somehow way better, which would be a level of propagandistic bullshittery I don't even think Trump would stoop to. I also shouldn't have to explain why the actions to fix homelessness should not be identical or even analogous to the actions taken to manage an invasive wolf population. There is an actual problem DHH is vaguely grasping at: western countries have an exceptionally low state capacity despite their status on the world stage. The West is run by people who believe their job is to merely manage the decline of their terminally-ill trade empires until the pieces get inevitably packaged up and sold to ancap-esque autocrats of trade. And the social and economic structures undergirding the west, especially in Europe, have ossified to the point where there is not only no place for immigrants of any stripe, but even our own young can't fit in. But the answer to this problem that always gets attention is the people who want to burn that remaining state capacity on incredibly vengeful, petty, and stupid acts of bullying. "I don't care how poor I am as long as I have someone else's neck below my boot" is just a recipe for mass impoverishment. > — [kmeisthax on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49074073) > > believe deportation is morally wrong in certain cases, that is, the law can be selectively broken. I (the author) do believe deportation is morally wrong in certain cases. For example, there are laws governing which people can be deported and for what reasons. Deportatipos that violate those laws are morally wrong. What I spent the whole article arguing against was the idea that people should be deported even when the laws say their deportation is illeagl. (It would be illegal to deport the vast vast majority of Roma in Denmark.) The other thing I argued for in the article is enforcement of the law against people who break it. > — [ChadNauseam on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49074646) > In many places, on Reddit especially, anything remotely referencing Travellers (UK), Roma, Gypsies will get flagged, locked, and taken down very quickly. To a degree there is brigading and to a degree a large number of people are unable to discuss them calmly. Personally, I didn't flag the article but I think it might be right to be flagged - just; I think you have discussed the issue calmly, but I find the article to be faux respectful and presenting itself as being neutral where it is not. To me the article reads as posturing and signalling, and using the headline (cancelling Hey) as a thin cover for discussing something else entirely (the blog post, the disagreements with it, and the political disagreement with DHH). Note that HN says anything off-topic should be flagged, and the definition for off-topic starts with: "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime...". If it had been, I'm cancelling Hey.com due to revelations about the owners DHH , its cost me $x and was good and now I'm going to $y then I think it would be on-topic. That all said; the topic you are really discussing is one that is very hard to have a reasonable conversation with people about. It has been unreasonably politicised, and is aggressively pursued as such; to a degree that distorts the basic facts and denies the real harms and impacts. One of my early roles involved physical security systems, and during it I encountered a large number of people suffering from related issues while the police both didn't have the power to resolve it and were not willing to wield the power they did have. I am deeply concerned about the widespread censoring of these discussions. > — [Normal\_gaussian on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49075925) > Based on the content of the post, it seems like it would be adequate to find an email platform run by people not vocally calling for the ethnic cleansing of minorities. > — [RGS1811 on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49073543) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49073007) · 166 points · 241 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [I'm sorry, Dave](https://daily.dev/posts/i-m-sorry-dave-u8qniobdg) · David Heinemeier Hansson · 2 upvotes · 0 comments --- [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/canceling-hey--olqdm6g8w) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Canceling \"Hey\"","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/canceling-hey--olqdm6g8w","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/canceling-hey--olqdm6g8w"},"datePublished":"2026-07-27T18:27:55.975Z","dateModified":"2026-07-27T21:56:03.847Z","description":"A long-time Hey email client customer explains why they cancelled their subscription after discovering DHH published an article comparing Roma people to wolves...","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--0_ODbtD2--/f_auto/v1722860399/public/Placeholder%2008","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--0_ODbtD2--/f_auto/v1722860399/public/Placeholder%2008","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"Hacker News","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Hacker News","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/t_logo,f_auto/v1/logos/hn","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},"commentCount":0,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/canceling-hey--olqdm6g8w","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":0},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":0}],"keywords":"","timeRequired":"PT7M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Hacker News","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"Canceling \"Hey\""}]} ```