And your reason for posting this pedantic diatribe hours after the original post was corrected to "objectified female bodies" is... What? To revel in a pedantic takedown of a straw man?
To be really straightforward with it: your post calls for censorship, both self-censorship and the institutional kind. It is your burden to point out why you think using zhis material in illustrations of a technical claim deserves censorship, and if you overstep the line of what is reasonable, you deserve as much criticism as the person you would want to censor.
To be sure, persons (not bodies) can be objectified ... as a means for attaining power, money, sex, whatever. As one person pointed out, the actual contents of the pictures didn't matter to most HN readers, it could have contained gay-specific material and still have the exact effect ("whoa, splitting into three b/w channels"). Was there any objectification involved in the student using these photos to illustrate this point to us? I guess not. Should we be sad that this guy didn't have any pictures of food or sunny beaches that looked recognizable in black and white? Probably yes, even though calling for public ostracism and censorship would be way over the line.
(The operative part of that reply was "hours after it was amended". Your rant, and 90% of the other replies on this thread, added nothing at all to the conversation besides typical red pill douche-baggery.)
I'm posting a day late into the thread to say that all of your posts on this thread have been very counter-productive, glib, and mean-spirited. Please don't accuse other HN'ers you've never met of being douchebags. You ruin the conversation by doing so. This is not reddit, or 4chan, so please don't treat HN as if it were.
I'm frankly shocked that dang hasn't been here to state this for me.