Comment by dang

Actually that article made it into our second-chance pool (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10705926 and earlier posts linked from there), which placed it on the front page, where it stayed for about 90 minutes. Its problem was that it got few upvotes.

It was also penalized by the flamewar detector (because there was a super active discussion relative to the upvotes). Had we seen that we would have taken the penalty off, but it wouldn't have made much difference because that wasn't why it fell off the front page to begin with.