Thanks, but we didn't do anything different in this case and are as surprised as anyone that the post went to #1 and (better still!) the discussion remained as civil as it has. I don't want people to think that the ycombinator.com domain affects moderation on an article like this, since our first rule is to moderate less, not more, when YC is involved [1].

I emailed Cadran to warn her that the post would probably meet the same fate as the others, but I was wrong—the community responded quite differently. That's fine by us as long as the discussion meets the site guidelines, which this one mostly has.

Edit: also, the community should know that it, not moderators, produced this effect. IMO that makes the thread more interesting.

1. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...