But there are vastly more important factors. One is that there are other moderators. They just don't post publicly.
By far the most important is HN's community. We have so many dedicated users who care about the quality of this place, and they send a steady stream of heads-ups about things we need to look at*. That's the reason for your "god mod" impression—it would be impossible for one person, or even a team, to see all these things, but what I'm actually looking at are things that other people have seen and are bringing to our/my attention, whether by flagging them or by emailing hn@ycombinator.com. So it's a "given enough eyeballs" thing.
We can always use more such help, so if you (or anyone) notice something that we should probably be looking at, please flag it and/or email hn@ycombinator.com. We usually can look at it pretty quickly—though it may take me longer to reply and my worst-case latency is shameful.
* For example, I've got 3 or 4 emails at present asking about why "I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again" (https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=mataroa.blog) has been posted 14 times and keeps getting flagged. Yeah, that's probably something we should look at.
If you go on vacation, is there a backup? And if you retire, or God forbid, get incapacitated from some unforeseen event, is there a continuity plan? I assume contingencies exist
Contingencies exist! There are other mods who know how everything works, and have been at it a long time. I trust them and they'll do a great job if I get hit by a bus. It would just be hard on them to weather the public side of the job.
One thing that would suck if I get hit by a bus is that the people who know the code and the people who know how moderation works aren't the same pepole. That's not optimal.
Really cool! How different is Arc running HN or your extension from Arc3.1, the last-released version?
At the language level, we've changed things but not super much. It's maybe 30% different.
At the application level there have been many changes and it's more like 80% different.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11240350 has discussion of one change we made to Arc, though it's already 8 years old - the midpoint between today and the original release of Arc, I guess.
While technically being against the ‘rule’ against editorializing titles, I guess in this case it was to make it less sensational xD
"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's always interesting to to me that although the rule cuts both ways, people only tend to remember one. Maybe that 'unless' needs to be phrased more clearly?