I can't really make sense of the more general accusation but the "countermeasures" accusation was hacker news removing some http field/attribute (?) telling the

I can't really make sense of the more general accusation but the "countermeasures" accusation was hacker news removing some http field/attribute (?) telling their servers the request originated from a link clicked on HN so they could not block traffic originated from here (which they were doing) I fail to see how this was such a big issue to them. The admin probably felt like it was not cool to discriminate against traffic from the site and bypassed their block. When they complained about it meaning it wasn't just a stunt but quite important to them, it was removed. Much ado about nothing imho.