I think the original article is ok, since it is generally interesting (news about Thunderbird, opens discussion about Thunderbird, Mozilla, their technologies) and not just a job ad.
I don't know of a rule against job ads in general. I would guess generally such would be mostly just not interesting.
YC company job listings are a special case though, they appear on the front page without voting possibility. This had been the case since the beginning of HN.
Well, the Mailpile job ad also says that they're trying to make it easier to install on Windows and macOS and that they got the funds from the bitcoin fluctuations. It's also not "just" a job ad.
Mailpile is interesting because it's trying to give a convenient frontend for encryption. Maybe if encryption had a better UI, more email would be encrypted.
> A regular "Who Is Hiring?" thread appears on the first weekday of each month. Most job ads are welcome there. [...]
> The other kind of job ad is reserved for YC-funded startups. [...]
But IMHO this is an special case that deserve an exception. (Usually following the rules the 100% of the time blindly is not optimal.)
This is a very big/popular project, and it is the first hire, so the are changing the internal organization of the developers. (The #87 hire will not be interesting.)
I don't know of a rule against job ads in general. I would guess generally such would be mostly just not interesting.
YC company job listings are a special case though, they appear on the front page without voting possibility. This had been the case since the beginning of HN.