Well, it's not against the guidelines, so yes it's up to the votes. And clearly it interests the readers of the site so that's why it's front page. It's a major announcement by a leading technology company. Is that not a thing that interests technology nerds?
Comments
How is this ad frontpage news?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This fits those two guidelines.
What do the guidelines have to do with this? I'm curious why people are upvoting an ad especially when most of the comments are non-sequitors.
Well, it's not against the guidelines, so yes it's up to the votes. And clearly it interests the readers of the site so that's why it's front page. It's a major announcement by a leading technology company. Is that not a thing that interests technology nerds?
Big tech product announcements are arguably more in the remit of hacker news than most of the stuff on the front page.