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.