Comment by dang

> I'd challenge the idea that this got upvoted for intellectual interest

Of course we can only guess about that. No doubt the users who flagged the article feel the same way as you. On the other hand, I disagree because I can feel it touching my own intellectual curiosity: it's extraordinary that a 5-year-old could and would do that. Yes it's strongly sentimental, which is not usually our thing here, but it's important for HN to have the occasional story in that overlapping part of the Venn diagram.

This is one of the cases where a moderator's individual taste affects the site. Is that fair? No it is not, but there's an interesting reason to do it anyway: you need some sort of individual judgment affecting the site, in order to prevent it from converging into the brown noise of everyone-put-together. A system like HN can get itself into a rut otherwise, becoming too predictable and too common-denominator. I don't think that I'm the best individual to supply the perturbations; it's just that someone needs to, and for whatever reason I ended up in that role. Since this function is about bumping the system out of its grooves, sort of like the mutations in a genetic algorithm, it probably doesn't matter that much if I do a fabulous job on that point. I just need to not suck at it, and if that were the case, HN would probably be screwed for more significant reasons.