Literally the first principle of HN moderation is that we moderate less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is involved: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... That doesn't mean we don't moderate at all, but we're extremely conscious and careful about it. The first step in onboarding any HN moderator is to instill in them the fear of god, hellfire, and the internet about this.
If you want to share what you specifically saw about what specific thread, I could try to reconstruct what we did. Just in general, though, it's extremely easy to read sinister patterns into this material, for the simple reason that there are more than enough data points to support any pattern. This is the curse of the von Neumann elephant (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Or to put it another way: "unquestionably biased" is internet speak for "I saw a thing that I thought kind of looked like that".
> Would be interesting to know what they did in this case
I'm afraid the rather boring answer is that we did nothing because we didn't see it (until now, 18 hours later). It's not the sort of article we'd put in the second chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), because there's little new information there. The authors seemed to have "caught" these guys in the act of working on their startup, cornered them for an interview, but didn't manage to squeeze much out of them. So I think we'd probably all be better off waiting for the thing to actually launch. That's one of the more reliable HN principles: "there's no harm in waiting" - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...