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.