Opinions vary on citation styles, my point was that it seems reasonable for a publication to standardise on one citation style, i.e. to require its use. I'm not sure it's what dynm meant by very complicated (and unstated) "rules" for how a paper is supposed to look. That article by DJB mentions that every author really ought to be using a citation-management solution like BibTeX, so that regardless of your preferences, it's easy to change your whole paper to a different citation style.

There's a slight (but only slight) irony in your use of the HackerNews convention for handling multiple links without breaking up the body of the main text. In this short-form medium it works great. I see someone made this same point in the thread you linked, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40673426