Shouldn't it be? I think HN was perfectly fine in this regard. There are a lot of companies that aren't 10gen that would take this, go to a court, and try and dig up the person who wrote the article to sue them for libel, whether the article is true or not.
Just because in this case it was a hyperbolistic rant, doesn't mean there won't be a situation in the future where there's valid points being raised against a company that might retaliate against the author.
And as has been noted, the first comments on the article were counterpoints to it.
Please show me the cases of a company taking someone to court for libel for making technical complaints such as this.
It happens all the time on blogs and in mailing lists where people sound off like this about products (rightly or wrongly) and I have not heard of a single, solitary case of a person being taken to court for libel by a tech company.
By the way - the odds are that any company that tried that would lose, not only in court but also in public opinion.
Other companies may not handle it as well as 10gen - but I've yet to see a company try to take someone to court.
Is this something HN can fix?
When I vote something up (as I did with the article mentioned), I'm thinking "this seems interesting", not "this seems authoritative and well sourced". The idea that someone might go through the effort of writing something like this as a "prank" didn't even enter my mind. Perhaps it might help for there to be some short-circuit mechanism for publicly flagging false stories which are found to be blatantly fabricated (or is it a rare enough occurrence that it doesn't matter)?