"family's house catches fire, dad uses iphone to call 911"

What does that have to do with anything?

The article is about a guy who made an iPhone app (iShoot) that made enough money to help his family out of their tough financial situation ...

Am I missing something?

Although, his app saved his house in the exact same sense any other paying job does - so the headline is kind of silly.

Nevermind - I'm an idiot.

I just came back to HN, and looked at there's [my god, typing "there's" feels so wrong, even though it's actually right] comment again. It was clearly satirizing the sort of inane iPhone-centric articles that get voted up.

Don't know how I missed that ...

The only solution is to start clicking on submissions with boring titles like "iPhone app developer makes money, pays bills".

Or for people to start writing more "How I wrote a successful iPhone app that doesn't fart, belch, or jiggle"

I hate that this is the fourth or fifth time we've had a story about the guy on the front page of HN. The first one was nice, all the others are pretty much differently worded copies of the first. (Wish I had more karma so I could downvote stuff like this. -ed. Nevermind.)

More karma wouldn't give the ability to downvote a story, which is by design. If you want things like this off the frontpage, help push quality to it.

After reaching a certain level you get the ability to flag stories but its one of those Peter Parker things, not to be trifled with just because the story isn't quite your favorite of the day.

Ah, I guess I was wrong... thanks for correcting me. (But it does give the ability to downvote other people's comments, no? Or am I going crazy... ?)

You can downvote comments after a certain karma threshold but not stories. At least not that I know of, or at least at a different level than comment downmodding.