It is a hard rule! https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I thought the the word “guidelines” usually implied something more flexible. Thank you for the clarification (I certainly appreciate the limited snarkyness and toxic sarcasm within the hn community).

"I got your hard rule right here" would have been a perfectly fine reply, I think, so your initial impression is probably not that far off the mark in practice.

After seeing plenty of discussions on HN where people expressed how they'd rather keep using Zoom despite 1) clear security issues and 2) the development teams living in China, I didn't feel there was any other way to express the issue (and the discrepancy in values). There seems to be a blindness to geopolitical realities in the tech world, and this occurrence is the perfect example.

Same pattern as with Windows unfortunately...