As Tomte and jdoliner pointed out, 4 points in 11 minutes would get you on the front page at any time, let alone a slow time like this one. As for why the post would get rapid votes, that's easy: moth-to-flame subject matter.

It's not great to post comments like this taking a thread so badly off topic, let alone jumping to conclusions that the admins are manipulating what is obviously (once you're familiar with it) baseline HN behavior. Love-hate-Go posts are a drug here; and so are all things Rust, which is why those stories are currently #1 and #2. If we did anything to posts like that it would be to downweight them, but I'm tired, and a good pro-and-con language vent seems like a fairly innocuous thing for HN to do overnight (with apologies for our Pacific-timezone-centricity), so have at it.

That seems like a dangerous system, though. Just a few coordinated upvotes can get a post to the front page. And if it's so easy, you'll almost certainly have people/companies abusing that to promote their content.

Sure, but this problem has been around for years, and HN has developed many mechanisms to deal with it. Some are obvious—if a post gets to the front page without community interest, it will quickly attract flags, and probably a lot of ornery comments too—and many more run silently beneath the surface. I think the proof is in the pudding: we don't see a lot of this. Anybody getting away with it regularly is probably being so devilishly clever as to deserve their ill-gotten gains.

The rate of growth of the upvotes w.r.t time is extremely high for this submission. 0.5(just now) to 1(now) upvote per minute.

That's normal.

I'm a nobody (to answer the accusation below) and my submissions of articles that are years old and not recognizably "hot" make it to the front page with only three to five upvotes all the time.

Quick upvotes or comments count for a lot.

When I saw it on the front page, it had only 4 votes. How can that count for anything?

Four upvotes in the first minutes are absolutely a strong signal.

Probably because the author is a renowned engineer (dtrace, etc)

So the whole voting system is artificially skewed by HN admins?

HN has always had some editorial oversight from admins. That being said I'm not sure why you were initially surprised at this being on the front page with 4 upvotes in 11 minutes. That's a lot by hn standards. Check new, this and 1 other post are the only ones above 4.

You must be new here

I'm not new here and I'm somewhat taken aback

Isn't 4 upvotes in 11 minutes a lot for Hackernews? I don't think there's anything untoward going on here but I may be naive.

Oh. Ranking here has always been mysterious and corrupt.

Do You think all those ycombinator company posts get to the front page on their own merit? Ha!

There's several hundred Y Combinator companies, but I don't think I've seen a commensurate number of posts to HN. You'd know if it was open slather on Y Combinator companies posting self-promotion material to HN because this post would not be at the top, it would be some launch page for a company ending in 'ly'.

I typically only notice YC companies mentioned here when it is a Techcrunch (or similar) article about them.

It's as if a community of programmers and engineers can't understand the various weights a ranking algorithm can take into account outside of plain "2 > 1".

Stunning.

Besides other points mentioned, I think HN crowd has a love/hate relationship with Go (the other one I noticed is Python), so it's natural to go up quite fast.

Sure, but it had only 4 votes and it was second on front page