"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
(Typos / spelling mistakes certainly fit this category)
It's not tangential; it speaks to the editorial process or lack thereof at this publication that they couldn't catch a misspelling of a major American city. It casts the entire article in doubt.
It never feels tangential, and I'm not saying your point isn't a good one! It's just that if you zoom out far enough, it's obviously not the topic, and this sort of subthread has a way of attracting more attention (and therefore upvotes) than discussion that's about the topic and genuinely curious.
Here's my favorite way of explicating that guideline: it's not that these things aren't annoying—they are annoying! That's why people make posts like this and upvote them. It's just that, at a global level, they aren't optimal for what we're, er, optimizing for (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). Hence that guideline.
Not quite phonetically, but spelled as pronounced? I'd assume we're talking about Space City in Texas vs the street in NY pronounced like a house that weighs a ton.
(Typos / spelling mistakes certainly fit this category)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html