I'm sure it topped the home page ten minutes ago. I came back two minutes ago to see if there were any comments, and the entry is nowhere to be found.
What happened?
This was the story: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/05/y-combinator-head-who-pushes-basic-income-is-reportedly-running-for-office/
Edit: ok, here you go:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14342198 was flagged as a dupe because it points to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14337507, which at 109 points and 41 comments clearly passes the 'significant attention' test for duplicates (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). Did that story belong on HN in the first place? Yes and no. On the one hand it's sensational and super close to home. On the other, it's far from substantive. All that happened is a gossip column published one side of a conversation and then the click-starved trade sites farmed it out in their usual fashion. If there's an 'interesting phenomenon' in HN's sense here, I'd say it's that Willie Brown became an old-school, Herb-Caen-style society columnist after his incredibly long political career. I had no idea.
A couple more points about standard HN practice. First, when a story hasn't happened yet, there's usually little value in discussing it. Most stories that haven't happened, never do happen. We call this category "announcement of an announcement" and have learned over the years that it is the low-hanging fruit of offtopicness. Some recent comments on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14311910 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14314105. For HN purposes, there's no harm in waiting for the actual thing to occur. Patience is a virtue i.e. a strength.
Second, when stories about YC are involved, we moderate HN less, not more. That's literally the first principle of HN moderation: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&date.... This case is a funny one though. What does 'moderating less' mean? If we mark a post about this as a dupe or penalize it as fluff, some say we're moderating HN to suppress an unwanted story. But suppose it spent the day on HN's front page instead—then others would say we were moderating HN to stealth-promote a political career. That's a classic Bateson double bind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_bind.