To draw a parallel, do you think HN would be more successful if it relied on "intuition" for norms of discussion?
HN's moderating guidelines are about content whereas FreeBSD's new Code of Conduct codifies human behaviour, as the name would imply. They are different things.
To your second point: The BSD guidelines address content ("comments") and physical meetings, which I assume apply to conferences and hackathons. I don't see the distinction you are making between "content" and "human behavior," as content is human behavior online. There is good research on moderated communities. Anecdotally, I am talking to you here and not on Reddit because of stronger guidelines (and the resulting, to my mind, higher quality of discussion).
That's a really interesting statement - I think that it has more to do with the actual people in the community (including the individual people moderating) than the guidelines they wrote. I think that if you took the HN guidelines and told a major subreddit's team to implement them, the discussion there wouldn't get any better. Why? Because it's all dependent on the judgment of the community and the moderators, and you either have that resource (and are already using it) or you don't.
You might also note that HN regularly fills up with pages upon pages of sexist (more rarely, racist) tripe. Which might be ok for HN but the people who participate in the FreeBSD project have decided it's not ok for their thing.
Do you truly think so?
I like it here well enough, don't get me wrong. But I don't know that replacing flame wars with passive aggressiveness - which is essentially what HNs moderation does - is a great tradeoff.