I wish you'd consider investing less time in technical countermeasures to dumbness (all of them are gameable, and the brand of dumbness you're fighting is not at all incompatible with an intuitive talent for that gamesmanship) and more time into just setting better community norms.
It is hard to imagine that the site guidelines you write years and years and years ago when this place was tiny are, intact and without change, the optimal guidelines for the site in 2012.
It's also the case that the things you say to guide the tone of the community, for better or worse, have a huge impact on how the community works.
If it should be a norm of HN that criticisms be kept constructive, and that the community should have a default position of supporting entrepreneurship (and, more generally, of supporting attempts to build anything) --- and, that should be a norm. --- why can't you just say so? Not in comments, buried in random threads, but in somewhere prominent on the site. Like, for instance, the guidelines. Which you need to update. Please.
It is hard to imagine that the site guidelines you write years and years and years ago when this place was tiny are, intact and without change, the optimal guidelines for the site in 2012.
It's also the case that the things you say to guide the tone of the community, for better or worse, have a huge impact on how the community works.
If it should be a norm of HN that criticisms be kept constructive, and that the community should have a default position of supporting entrepreneurship (and, more generally, of supporting attempts to build anything) --- and, that should be a norm. --- why can't you just say so? Not in comments, buried in random threads, but in somewhere prominent on the site. Like, for instance, the guidelines. Which you need to update. Please.