But why would you discuss the implementation to end-users who probably wouldn't even understand what "implementation" means? The discussions you see in the subthread is not a discussion that would appear on less-technical forums, and I wouldn't draw any broader conclusions based on HN conversations in general.
Because the implementation leaks to the user experience. The user at least needs to know whether after running the utility, the duplicate files will be gone, or whether changing one of the files will change the other.
Symbolic links, hard links, ref links are all part of the file system interface, not the implementation.
