Ask HN: Where did the "little girl with moon ambitions" article go?

[shivam14]

I saw this article (http://www.cbc.ca/technology/technology-blog/2009/07/moon_landing_space_anniversary.html) at No. 3 on the front page at around noon CST. By 1p CST the article has dissapeared.

My guess is that the link was flagged and taken down. What was the criteria behind this? I am not advocating for the article but just trying to understand the rationale behind this step.

[icey]

Enable the "showdead" option in your profile and all HN's secrets will be yours.

[noodle]

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

[shivam14 → noodle]

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?

[scott_s → shivam14]

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.

[noodle → shivam14]

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.