[Steko]

I haven't bothered to link many hnrankings I've done personally because (tangent) both HN search & hnrankings.info are blocked by the handsome and intelligent admins at my office (/tangent).

But here's a simple experiment that can be done in a few minutes: search for daringfireball.net links on HN, click on the ones with a decent number of points, put those into hnrankings.info and you'll see a clear pattern of flagging for pretty much every single one.

Now maybe Gruber articles are just terrible (ymmv) but I can say that every other article I've seen flagged down (fairly easy to tell from rank/points/time) falls into the same categories. And I don't see how it's a big conspiracy theory to apply occam's razor to the observation that "hey all these anti-google or pro-apple or pro-ms links have a graph that makes it look like they were flagged off the first page". The same mentality that would abuse this is not hard to find in the comment sections of many tech sites so I'm not sure why anyone would be surprised or think HN is immune.

And again if HN mods want to produce a list of flagged articles I'm confident it would back the assertions that I and others have made.