It's not written; it is just how these voting-based sites (HN, Reddit, Stack Overflow) work.

You appear to be familiar with this: `On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.'

If a particular story meets that, upvote. If it does not, and is severely against it, flag it and move on.

As for getting flooded with Steve posts a couple days ago: we are humans here too, and many of the people here would say that they lost a hero of this crowd. A lot of people needed a bit of time of mourning; that's okay once in a while.