My understanding is dang has said in the past they do some anti moderation(I’m sure he has a better term) for posts related to ycombinator. That is to say they moderate less and might, do not quote me here, even boost a tad. So upvoted story by a well reputed source even without many comments is likely to hang onto the front page for a bit.
You're thinking of the principle I've explained here over the years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... - that we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC-funded startup are part of the story.
"Less" doesn't mean "not at all", of course—that would be too big a loophole. But it does mean strictly less, and we stick to that, despite its various downsides, because the upside is bigger.
In the present case, it means we haven't applied any moderation downweights to this post, even though it's obviously the sort of thing we would downweight under other circumstances, since it's neither particularly substantive nor intellectually interesting (though it could be some other kind of interesting, at least to some readers).