I'm kinda blown away that this question hasn't been closed on stack overflow already. The mods are usually so aggressive about discussion-type questions.
This isn't a discussion-type topic. It's a question that has a non-subjective answer that doesn't depend on one's opinion. That being said, it might be migrated to programmers.SE and now that the question made it to HN the mods might notice it and actually do so, but I hope they won't.
Protection is ok. Whenever a question gathers that much publicity there are many who are not aware of how the site works and try commenting by answering the question with a comment. Which is unwanted on SO/SE. It doesn't prevent people from commenting, it doesn't take the question away, it doesn't prevent established users from giving a better answer, so I feel that's not as drastic as migration or deletion.
This isn't a discussion-type topic. It's a question that has a non-subjective answer that doesn't depend on one's opinion. That being said, it might be migrated to programmers.SE and now that the question made it to HN the mods might notice it and actually do so, but I hope they won't.