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.
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.