I agree that there were too many Geeklist articles, and that these ones deserved to be killed.
But the fact that Geeklist is a tech company is a distraction. The real issue is how to deal with customers - even shouty sweary customers. "Don't get baited by your customers; especially over Twitter" is about the only useful thing coming from that thread.
(Anything else, such as "don't use semi-naked women in advertising" is too political (ie, unlikely to lead to any useful interesting discussion) or too obvious to mention.)
The ban on political articles on HN is needed. When I first started here I thought it'd be great to see the comments to political threads. Surely HN would be a place where people could put aside partisan politics and give thoughtful reasoned responses, backed by evidence, leading to rational discussion. Unfortunately not. Political threads pretty quickly collapse into bad-natured bickering.
I'd speculate that women seem to have no trouble entering that industry, much less succeeding, and they're not taught (explicitly nor implicitly) from an early age that advertising is "for boys" because "copywriting is hard" or some such.
Speculation on my part, and I won't hesitate to agree that far too much advertising is sexist. But then I'd end up on an off-topic rant. :)
How would an advertising agency have dealt with the issue?