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If they are discouraged, why do they have their own entry in the header[1]? I always thought the light text was just to separate them visually from the comments.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/ask

Right -- what a good observation. @dang -- any opinion?

"@dang" doesn't seem to work. You're best off email hn@ycombinator.com to get their attention

There seems to be a few other undocumented features like these in HN. Or maybe they are documented somewhere and I dunno :)

I'm not sure this is correct. The Ask HN posts that get voted up are usually high quality.

Text-only posts are down-weighted by whatever ranking algorithm HN uses, so only the high-quality ones will rise to the top (usually).

Great response, thanks! I like the HN questions -- but I understand maybe that's not their thing. :)

The variety of Ask HN is a positive feature this community has over a pure aggregator, IMO.