There are PR agencies that take care of your content to be trending.
They do use fake accounts to upvote and manipulate, but you as a customer don’t have to know that.
Occam's razor it's more likely the mods or YC has some social or other connection to the project
I'm certainly not a mod or affiliated with YC and I've had random things I posted briefly end up on the front page. Then if people keep upvoting it, they sometimes remain there...
I'm not accusing you of anything. It's well known that the front page is heavily curated and not purely the result of upvotes.
Occam's razor would suggest that mods simply thought that it would generate insightful discussion, and manually pushed it up, something that dang regularly does and a core feature of HN -- and that is assuming it was pushed up in the first place.
This is the place where dark triad sam altman got his start; let's not be pollyannas about how things work around here.
Wouldn’t it just be easier to ask their team to upvote the post? They probably all have legitimate hacker news accounts already and are happy to upvote their work.