[pvg]

you've now moved the goalpost quite far from where we started

I don't follow. You weren't familiar with the rules of HN dupery and I've tried to explain them. That's not moving the goalposts. Followups are almost always dupes. Metaish follow-ups the very next day dupely so.

[mumblemumble]

A rule and its implementation are two separate matters.

With all due credit to rmasters, "I suspect it would not have been flagged if the topic were different."

[pvg]

Well, yeah, that's your suspicion but it is not an argument, it's just a suspicion that something nefarious is going on. I don't think you've really responded to any of the explanations of why HN works this way. That doesn't mean the way HN works is right but you have to bring something more to it than aspersions if you want to argue for change.

[mumblemumble]

"nefarious"? "nothing more to it than aspersions"?

Please don't strawman me like that. If you're going to make "the rules of HN dupery" the place where you want to make your stand, then this seems like a peculiar response. These rules for HN dupery are not actually published anywhere outside of HN mod team comments when debates like this come up. By contrast, though, the published commenting guidelines clearly state "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

Which, I realize that this whole tangent is then in contrast with the very next guideline in the list, which exhorts us to "Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." But, since HN lacks the meta-discussion channels that other comparable community sites have, these sorts of frustrations can't really do aything but boil over into public every so often, so I'm self-consciously allowing myself the conceit. In my defense, I've also been following and engaging in what I thought was some of the more interesting HN discussion I've seen in a minute. Including having my opinion on a programming language and its community go through some positive changes. So I do somewhat feel, then, that HN moderation deciding to flag the article and then bury it on the 2nd page because they think it's just a flamewar is tacitly an unfair accusation against which I must defend myself. And, frankly, the alternative defense that it's because it isn't interesting comes across as dismissive and condescending.

[tptacek]

Many of the rules of HN aren't published in a straightforward list; you learn them by following the log of moderator comments. That, too, has been has been explained innumerable times on HN: it's a common law system, not a civil law one, because if you build a site for nerds around a rigid set of enumerated statutes, the nerds will spend most of their time looking for clever loopholes (I'm not disparaging them; I'm one of them).

From the way you've written on this thread, it seems pretty clear that you're not the kind of message board nerd that makes 'dang's comments a daily read. That's fine! You have to be a pretty extreme nerd to do that, and there other, probably better things to spend those nerd points on. But you should take 'pvg's word for it on this stuff. He's not messing with you: he's trying to explain to you how the site works.