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jsnell's answer is correct.

We restore these things when we see them but sometimes someone needs to tell us about it! the way to do that is hn@ycombinator.com. (Someone did tell us in this case.)

It probably triggered the flamewar detector (a lot of comments, not a lot of upvotes). Not surprising given what a horrible title the other post has.

And now this submission is just gone. Rather disappointing, this was an interesting topic.

(if this gets restored and someone wants to remove these comments, feel free)

IIRC HN has some sort of flame war heuristic and when comments outrank votes on a submission it gets deranked. Which is kin of unfortunate if it's just ordinary discussion.

HN algorithm is weird. I think it's moderated with manually inserted weights.