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3 upvotes over three hours and it makes the front page? A murder story from the renaissance?

What did dang mean by this?

I didn't see it until now, but this looks like a fine historical article. Such things are not only on topic for HN, they're one of the scarcest resources here. It looks like it got plugged into the the second-chance queue (described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 and links back from there) by a moderator or a reviewer. Quite rightly!

Being on the front page with only three upvotes is a separate issue, though. That's just how the front page works when traffic is low.

The person who submitted this has 7066 karma. I would be surprised if it has nothing to do with that.

I had an account previously with karma in that range and never saw anything like that. Looking back at previous submissions, they appear to be historically oriented. Maybe the account got flagged as interesting on that account.

On the other hand, three votes over three hours is a pretty insanely low bar, especially for a non-technical article.

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