Why flag a non-offensive, non-spam article? That is what the point/vote system is for. If more people in the hackernews community want to read interesting non-technical, non-startup related articles then they are "hacker news", or at least "news interesting to hackers".
The flagging system is to weed out spam, advertisements, offensive/porn, etc. This is flagging abuse IMHO.
I watched a 60 minute talk from Tarek Ziadé a few months ago in EuroPython 2013 which was very interesting. His point regarding the missing features that made them launch project Circus were realtime stdout/stderr, realtime stats, powerful web console, remote, clustering and scalable.
The flagging system is to weed out spam, advertisements, offensive/porn, etc. This is flagging abuse IMHO.