Hacker News Reader

My read of it is that's exactly what they were saying. The software replaced "ass" with "*", which made it even worse because now it read like the software was correcting the n-word (and in turn suggesting the person was using the n word).

I think the suggestion is that to the uninformed, "n*er" or "n***er would appear to be a censored n-word.

It was supposed to be three stars actually, but the other two vanished due to HN formatting.