Let's perform a thought experiment, all completely hypothetical, of course.
Suppose someone, call them R, has been on HN for over three years. Suppose also that over those years R has, for various reasons, ended up with more than one HN username.
Suppose that R noticed some interesting behavior in relation to flags and rankings and decided to investigate. Waiting until one of his (or her) submissions hit the front page, R then used the other usernames to flag it and watch how the ranking changed. Having done that, R then unflagged the submission to check that it returned to its previous ranking, providing evidence (although obviously not a guarantee) that there had been no other flags to affect the ranking.
At the end of that R would hve a pretty good idea of how many flags were needed to change the ranking of an item.
Would you agree?
Having worked it out, though, R might decide not to make this information public. Why? Perhaps because R respects PG's decision not to make various details of the rankings system public, and chooses to cooperate.
So now, you claim that I "have no idea how many flags are needed." In the light of the above completely hypothetical thought experiment let me ask:
Are you sure?
Added in edit: In response to the replies to the above thought experiment, let me add that "a flag or two" was not intended to be taken literally. My apologies if you thought I literally meant either exactly one or exactly two. I did not. In hindsight perhaps I should've said "a few." I do not, however, intend to make public exactly what I do know about this issue.
In reply, I can tell you I've just taken an item off the Front Page with two flags, and then put it back again afterwards by unflagging.
Added in edit: Cool - I report the results of an actual experiment providing evidence in a discussion, and I get a downvote. Fascinating - I clearly still have much to learn about the people who read and react on Hacker News. I have no idea why this should get a downvote.
