Most people know that stories can be flagged on Hacker News, but I didn't know until today that stories can be silently and opaquely de-front-paged. I posted th

Most people know that stories can be flagged on Hacker News, but I didn't know until today that stories can be silently and opaquely de-front-paged. I posted this op-ed on Facebook, and it eventually caught on and made the front page, probably because a Facebook engineer commented and called attention to it. So, there I am hanging out, browsing around the web, watching a little StarCraft 2, discussing the article and comments with my friends on Gmail and GChat - when poof, the story is gone. Not dead gone, like it had been flagged by a moderator or a bunch of users in the normal fashion. Not dead gone like you could tell someone had flagged it. Instead, my story has been silently assassinated. It's still live, and it still shows up under New, but it no longer rates the front page, even though it outscores other articles. Lame.