But then how do you explain the popularity of this post? It was completely vacuous, but is still at 13 points as I write this.
And this off to a long digression about the opportunity cost of reading the bad articles vs. the benefit of reading the good ones and on and on...
But yeah, it's not perfect. If anything, if there were no articles you disliked on the front page, then HN would probably be too conservative a filter.