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odds are, it was flagged for being non-topical.

Probably. However, it was upvoted to number three (hopefully legitimately) and had a couple of interesting comments (including one on the work of Aldous Huxley). Aren't those two factors a major test of appropriatness for news.yc?

well, there have been many similar threads. ones that had a lot of responses, interesting posts, lots of upvotes, but still got axed due to relevance.

the ones in the front of my mine are articles that were perhaps marginally relevant to HN on the topic of the current economic problems.

PG said two weeks ago that if a story gets flagged enough times, it can get auto-killed. He recently put in a point threshold that prevents auto-killing. See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=686303

Personally, I think it's a fallacy to assume a popular story is an appropriate one. Popularity rules results in Digg, which we're trying to avoid.

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