I took a quick look at the early votes and they look legit to me. Several of them came from people posting the article all at once, which converts into an upvote of an existing submission if there already is one. Perhaps the presence of the other thread contributed to this being particularly topical today.

Edit: a bit of confirming evidence is that most of those early voters voted for both threads, i.e. this one and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22366474.

OK thanks for checking it out I feel a lot better about it then.

In the future, it'd be helpful to email questions like this to [email protected]. The site guidelines ask you not to post about this in threads, and also it's basically random whether we end up seeing it. An email is nearly certain to get seen, and if we see it, we'll look into the issue and get back to you.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Will do, I had not thought of that.

You're surprised that people are interested in the next installment of an SV Twitter / YC world startup kerfuffle? Everyone's getting out their popcorn.

The news is absolutely timed by Lambda itself to counter the negative coverage, but it made HN because it's relevant and people are watching the play-by-play.

I upvoted because it's newsworthy, even if the timing is suspicious.

How do you do that?