Shady? It's great. Little increases site culture in a more positive way than a community taking advantage of a flaw in the software it's running on, especially on a site wanting to encourage curiosity like HN. I'm surprised you disagree; reddit had some of the coolest examples of this:
I disagree specifically because I've been on the receiving end enough times to know that as fun as it is, it's a huge pain in the ass for the devs who have to scramble to fix it before someone exploits it for evil.
If reddit wouldn't have moved away from Lisp, maybe you wouldn't have had to scramble to fix it. HN (as an example of a site that didn't move away from Lisp) fixes are always fairly quick, and the site has rarely had downtime.
https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/2pnpu/_/