Can an actual list of policies be posted somewhere ? - I don't ever recall there ever being a discussion of such a policy before. Certainly there have been highly voted non-HN job posts in the past (e.g. Khan Academy)
I'm reluctant to mess with the informal way that HN has been run over the years, so there isn't likely to be a complete list of rules. We do intend to augment the HN guidelines, though—just not any time soon. The new team has to get settled in first.
In the meantime, I've been posting feedback comments most places that issues like this come up. You may need to look to the bottom of the threads to see them, because we usually mark them off-topic.
And you can always get answers to questions by emailing hn@ycombinator.com.
The informal way things worked was by the community not upvoting posts or in some cases flagging them; if the new HN position is that moderators will manually intervene to enforce these informal policies then that's the major change. Publishing the policies is minor in comparison.
The informal way things worked before is exactly the same as how they work now. There is no "new HN position". The only difference is that we're trying to be more transparent, and that's not a policy change—it's that we have more time to put in to answering questions, and users made clear it was something they wanted.
