Ok, I'd love to understand why a perfectly regular piece of news was flagged, then.
Definitively something not transparent going on, on a very sensitive subject for the community.
> something foul
I wouldn't be so confident.
The article doesn't have a lot of information, the article was posted before, and there's not a lot to discuss except maybe local Silicon Valley politics. It comes across as a "tame rumor" piece rather than an announcement of something factual.
It doesn't seem like foul play, or that anything is being censored. It just doesn't seem super noteworthy.
I do think politics has some place on HN. Some of my favorite threads last year were after Brexit and the U.S. presidential election results, and I was disappointed to see that two of my recent submissions about the middle east were flagged as soon as they began to gain traction.
From guidelines: "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
This allows them a lot of leeway to take stuff down.
This site exists to gratify intellectual curiosity (i.e. curiosity about how the world works), not the other, more highly stimulating forms of curiosity.