Thanks for the thoughtful analysis. I agree with almost all of it.

I'm not sure how practical these particular suggestions are--for example, we do already try to identify which issues have already been discussed on HN; it's just hard to get right every time. But I do think the pendulum has perhaps swung too far the other way, so we've provisionally turned off the automatic weight on NSA stories. Going forward, I hope the community will help us distinguish major articles from minor ones. People can do that by flagging minor ones and commenting here or (better) emailing hn@ycombinator.com if they see a major one that they think might be weighted unfairly. We can turn off the flags when that happens.

HN's goals here are balance and substance.