He is a hero, period, end of story. If you listen to the recording, and watch the computer simulation, it's crazy what he did and he did it with complete calmness.

This, absolutely. The unexpected multiple bird strike took out both engines simultaneously. He made a conscious decision to bring the plane down in the river, as opposed to attempting to reach a nearby airport. Had he decided to go for an airport, he almost certainly would have fallen short and killed people on the ground (in the densely populated New York City) in addition to everyone on the plane. Bringing an aircraft down for a water landing is an extremely risky thing, and he was able to do so successfully without losing a single passenger. Hero indeed.

HN is very actively moderated, and where the user-based moderation is insufficient, dang and sctb step in frequently.

They're also highly responsive to emails to hn@ycombinator.com (generally within a few hours, if not sooner, almost always within a day), and take their jobs seriously.

On Reddit, negative comments far too often fester, though even there, well-moderated subs can produce high-quality discussion (AskHistorians, askscience, and similar).

I'm not without my criticisms of HN, and occasionally disagree with the mods. But I appreciate what they do and in the eight years or so I've been on the site, there's been little appreciable drift. Remarkable in the face of other platforms' trends.