HN generally awards primary status to the earliest post. That can get messy on popular or major stories where there's a flood of dupes. Other factors may involve paywall/non-paywalled sources (NYT is paywalled), and stories based on reporting elsewhere (HN prefers the original source).
TheDrive's story was posted at 2023-9-18 06:01:40
The NYT story was posted at 2023-9-18 12:20:40
The former was earlier by 6 hours 19 minutes.