Perhaps some kind of auto-downranking system used for moderation of specific topics or thigns (without explicitly removing them) that accidentally targeted said post? Just idle speculation.

Seeing as how HN normally automatically strips "how" out of a title such that "How I Journal" becomes "I Journal", having both "how" and "why" in the title may have been just too much for the modbot to handle on a Tuesday morning.

which is weird, because normally they just ratelimit you to oblivion and back - not even allow the post in the first place. or just set you to be automatically dead.

unless this is just a glitch of early ranking to get posts onto frontpage that posts start with an invisible negative amount of points and get upvoted out of new and the invisible negatives to frontpage? (eg all posts start out with some value of negative points between -10 and 0 or something and the new votes will help nudge it out to the frontpage?)