And, as last time this topic was brought up, I feel obliged to point out that HN rank is more than a function of votes, flags, comment total, and time. The quality of the comments, likely determined by the speed and voting patterns, is also used. This, or a similar system, is also reputed to be used to hide the "reply" link during suspected flamewars.

So sure, you could blame some perceived Google bias on Google shills flagging Microsoft articles. You could also blame some perceived Anti-Microsoft bias on Microsoft shills being abrasive and causing comment sections to become toxic (for example, by filling the comment sections with comments complaining about HN rank compared to Google articles).

I see little to no evidence for either, I am not in a position to inspect the complete data to determine what is causing any perceived phenomenon (nor are you, I suspect).

It's pretty clear when an article has been flagged off the frontpage intentionally on hnrankings.info and in my experience every link of the type also "just happened" to be anti-google, pro-ms or pro-apple.

I have seen your links to hnrankings.info and cannot say that they make it clear flagging is the cause (much less organized flagging). Your (and others) assertions are too strong for the data that you have.

With hnrankings.info I believe you could establish a trend (so far I have only seen specific handpicked examples, not a trend. A trend is probably there, but nobody that I have seen has bothered to do the legwork to uncover it.), but there is not enough there to say that (as many have claimed) there are non-organic rings of flaggers targetting pro-Microsoft articles.

I haven't bothered to link many hnrankings I've done personally because (tangent) both HN search & hnrankings.info are blocked by the handsome and intelligent admins at my office (/tangent).

But here's a simple experiment that can be done in a few minutes: search for daringfireball.net links on HN, click on the ones with a decent number of points, put those into hnrankings.info and you'll see a clear pattern of flagging for pretty much every single one.

Now maybe Gruber articles are just terrible (ymmv) but I can say that every other article I've seen flagged down (fairly easy to tell from rank/points/time) falls into the same categories. And I don't see how it's a big conspiracy theory to apply occam's razor to the observation that "hey all these anti-google or pro-apple or pro-ms links have a graph that makes it look like they were flagged off the first page". The same mentality that would abuse this is not hard to find in the comment sections of many tech sites so I'm not sure why anyone would be surprised or think HN is immune.

And again if HN mods want to produce a list of flagged articles I'm confident it would back the assertions that I and others have made.