[jedsmith]

"An interesting new phenomenon" is used an exception to the rule that politics (and so forth) shouldn't be posted. In the paragraph right before that quote, we find:

Anything that good hackers would find interesting. [...] anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

I was at PyCon as well, and observed the exact same anecdote that the OP describes. At my company's booth, the only minorities I can think of who talked to us were more than likely visiting from Europe, Asia, or South America. Therefore, I'm curious, and I'm interested to see the response; not from accusing Y Combinator of racism, as some seem to suggest, but merely to get some data on minority penetration into our field.

There is no "standard" for the front page. We're all smart people, and we can be trusted to make judgments.

[allenbrunson]

I was all set to vote this up until I got to the last paragraph.

It seems that a lot of people have the idea that HN is a democracy, run by the will of the people. Nothing could be further from the truth. pg and the editors have the last word on everything. It's not immediately obvious, because pg doesn't go around saying "I banned this guy because he was a jerk." That's polite of him, but the truth is, quite a few people get banned for being jerks, every day. And quite a few submissions get killed for being off-topic.

Having said that, I agree with you that this is a good submission, and I'm a little dismayed that raganwald is arguing against it. When I saw the subject line, and that it had over 100 comments, I figured it was going to be ugly. I was delightfully surprised to find myself honestly learning something from almost every comment I've read here. I haven't upvoted this much stuff in months. Pretty well restored my faith in humanity, it did.

[raganwald]

Actually, there is a standard for the front page, and "We're all smart people, and we can be trusted to make judgements" isn't it.

If it were, there would be no need for moderation. We would never need to flag posts or have moderators kill them, because the voting by the smart people making judgments would drive unworthy posts off the front page without any discussion or intervention.

There are a lot of reasons why moderation needs to trump voting, but that's probably even more OT. For now, I hope you accept that we should be smart, we should exercise our judgment, AND we should sometimes kill a discussion even if it's popular.

p.s. Of course, an argument that moderation trumps voting isn't an argument that this post needs moderation. It gratifies your intellectual curiosity, I get that. So far it doesn't gratify mine, but it could be that I have read an awful lot about this topic over the years and I would like to see an HN discussion have more to say than what I've already read on Reddit over the years, on UseNet, in editorials, and so forth.