Despite having received 18 votes in 5 hours and while never having advanced beyond page 3 on the list of trending links (position #67 currently), this piece trails behind another Times piece, "Why don't more American men take paternity leave?", which is on page 2 (position #45 currently), and which has received only 6 votes in the span of 8 hours.
It got a software penalty, probably correctly, because this topic is unfortunately more likely to lead nationalistic flamewar than thoughtful discussion. But let's try taking the penalty off and seeing.
By the way, you can't derive story rank from points and submission time—HN's system is more complex than that. That's all that "WTF" means here.
In other words, HN is not ranking posts by votes, but by some (presumably handcrafted) algorithm that shapes which topics are more likely to make it to the front page. TIL.
HN has always worked like that. There are three components to the system: community, software, and moderation. You need all three in order to keep a place like this functioning. It's no secret; we post about it all the time and are happy to answer questions.
A "software" penalty. Okay, Dan. Why don't you just come out and say someone modded it, rather than hide behind the veil of some dubious natural language processing or ratio analysis.
That's like blaming the dog for a fart.
The truth is that everyone operating HN would rather keep users in the dark about how and why stories land where they do. The idea being that if we could predict what the software might do, we'd try to manipulate the narrative, and if we knew when the hand of god intervened we might dare blaspheme.
But that gives up the truth anyway, because if we cannot know what "the software" will do, then we are prevented from knowing such facts, only in service to a false narrative, and that, in and of itself, is an unnatural intervention and willful deception.
WTF