Summary of HN logic/rules
jacquesm: That thread has been killed by the editors, that's why you can't reply to it, not because it's one day old.HN has some underwater tricks to keep the rif-raff out, these are 'mostly effective' so people put up with some of the more heavy handed moderation.Meta discussion (discussion about HN) is for the most part discouraged.The rules are relatively simple:  - behave

  - no trolling

  - no namecalling

  - no spam

  - avoid metadiscussion if you can (though, as in this
    case, if the rules were spelled out a lot of 
    metadiscussion would never happen)

  - use the 'flag' option instead of bitching about
    submissions

at the bottom of the page there is this http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html maybe there is more stuff in there that can help you.Just speaking for myself here, there is plenty that I think that is not ok in HN, especially the way in which some threads get killed because they're off-topic (I'd prefer if those threads were simply dropped from the index so that those involved in the conversation don't have the door slammed in their faces) but the value of HN far outweighs the downsides.For instance, I really don't think this item should have been killed:  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=889349

Here are the the arc 3 thresholds:  267:(= gravity* 1.8 timebase* 120 front-threshold* 1
  762:(= topcolor-threshold* 250)
  980:(= follow-threshold* 5)
  1038:(= downvote-threshold* 100 downvote-time* 1440)
  1208:(= flag-threshold* 30 flag-kill-threshold* 7   many-flags* 1)
  1326:(= legit-threshold* 0 new-age-threshold* 0 new-karma-threshold* 2)
  1670:(= poll-threshold* 20)
  1783:(= baditemreqs* (table) baditem-threshold* 1/100)
  1823:(= commentable-threshold* (* 60 24 45))
  1980:(= comment-threshold* -20)
  2267:(= leader-threshold* 1)  ; redefined later
  2317:(= active-threshold* 1500)

These have been changed in the meantime, I know that the downvote threshold is now 200, possibly others have changed as well, you could download the arc 3.1 sources and then
run    grep -n -E "\(= [^-]+-threshold" news.arc

on it, but there is no guarantee that the arc that runs HN is using the same settings.If you want to see the site 'plain', that is, without moderation filtered content you can set 'showdead' on in your profile. You still won't be able to click the links, but at least you'll be able to see what got killed.The stated reason why there is a 'secret sauce' to HN is to make it harder to game the system for spammers.