It might be better to make that proportional -- e.g. that 20 upvotes needs 30 flags. I think there are enough "junk" upvotes (catchy title that people upvote without reading, somebody's favorite topic, but didn't read the article, new users that aren't quite used to the HN vibe, etc.) and now a sufficient number of users that getting 10 votes probably isn't all that hard.

What I'd actually most like changed is that dead links become unclickable. The fact that a link doesn't belong here doesn't mean I don't want to see what it was.

Try e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=686224

Or http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/47550

pg has said in the past that it's because of spam. allowing the urls to stay live in that case would give them unwarranted google juice.

EDIT: pg says it's because he doesn't want people following spam links. i stand corrected.

It's not page rank (links are nofollow till they get 5 karma) but traffic. I want spammers to realize they get so little traffic from HN that it's not worth posting here.

Yeah, I recently had to post a completely irrelevant reply in a dead story to ask someone who had gotten there in time to paste me the link.

Without diving into the code, can you tell us the algorithm? Does it scale based on upvotes? Such that a 200 vote story is harder to kill than 70? Or is it just that once a story passes 50 upvotes it can't be programmatically killed?

At the moment it just has a threshold of 10 points.

Thanks Paul.