I am referring to t.me/hackernewslive, 27k subscribers. This post was reposted on Telegram within 2 minutes of it going live on HackerNews, when it still had <5 upvotes, so I feel there has to be either some manual or LLM-driven curation here, or something else.

Yes. It's the one. Honestly I'm wondering too how it chooses articles to post.

I created a channel for myself some time ago, and the only way that I could think of was to put a 12h delay and then count score+comments.