Those articles were flagged by users, not moderators, and I'm not sure moderators even saw them (I didn't).

The topic isn't banned. More substantive articles would stand a better chance of not getting flagged, though.

A highly controversial guy making controversial patches to a somewhat heated topic around these parts is going to get flagged by users too, how are you so certain it's the admins doing the hiding? Even when not flagged the score to comment ratios will drag those off the front page quickly.

Both threads devolved into politics, and that's likely the reasons why they got flagged. There's no evidence these were hidden by moderators, as opposed to because regular users flagged threads.

Having seen some of your comments on one of those threads, there's a decent chance your comments contributed to getting those posts flagged.

The [flagged] indicator on a submission usually indicates user flagging. Moderators and algorithms just quietly downweight submissions without any visible indicator. So this isn't an HN moderator position, the question to resolve is why users would flag it.

In this case, I'd have flagged them too if I saw them. The "long live" post is an aggressive tirade that reflects poorly on the author and led to a poor-quality discussion. The second is a link to a git commit history, which is weird in its own right and provides no explanation, and the context provided in the comments shows that a generally dislikable figure with extreme political views is now leading a fork of X11 that has yet to prove itself viable. So I'd probably have flagged that one too as pointless drama until proven otherwise.