That comment by karpathy was not made in bad faith. It's clearly an experiment done right here on HN so we can judge the tool ourselves.

Oh I totally agree! I thought about saying that but decided it would be confusing, but I guess it was also confusing not to.

What karpathy was doing is obviously in the spirit of the site [1], and HN has always been a spirit-of-the-law place, not a letter-of-the-law place [2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....

Would you consider updating the guidelines to this effect?

Yes, but I sort of feel like it's a corollary of the existing ones.