The first rule of HN moderation is to moderate less, not more, when YC startups are at issue:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

That doesn't mean we don't moderate at all, just less. For example, in this case, the repost was obviously a dupe by a large margin, so we marked it as a dupe. But when people complained about that, we were more likely to bend the rules because Gitlab is a YC startup. If it were an unrelated company, we would have been more likely to say something like "look you guys, this is standard practice and it's not a borderline call" and left the repost marked as a duplicate.