It is a little different but a thing that you might have missed in the quick read is that one of the things he was accused of was installing and using a backdoor.
it's odd when there's people who treat an optimistic outlook as an error.
It's pretty standard to be skeptical of extraordinary, poorly supported scientific claims and you didn't have to be an expert to find out experts were fairly skeptical of this from the beginning and the reasons for their skepticism. The broad HN sentiment was at odds with what you could find elsewhere. This isn't a moral failing or anything, just a common mode of HN-like forums but to elevate it to some some sort of positive rather than a thing to be cautious about seems backwards.
'curious conversation' is a much loftier, woolier and syntheticier goal than 'Rust' and HN strives towards it imperfectly. The measure, though, is 'does this or that change bring us closer to it' not 'can people unfamiliar with the site achieve mindmeld with dang by staring at the front page'.
The quotes overlap just about completely, they aren't offered with any additional analysis so the 'original source' of both the curation and transcription is really those slashdot comments. There's no 'ripping off' mentioned.
taped to the boom box playing Peter Gabriel you hold aloft outside their offices
That's Say Anything. It's a movie from the previous century. The scene from Love Actually you can actually recognize from gifs and recent SNL parodies.
These are all interesting questions for advertisers but it's not obvious the burden of addressing advertisers' problems should be dumped on users with next to no informed consent, as is the case now.