I believe HN has a flame war detector that trips when the number of comments is greater than the number of votes, and pulls the submission off the front page. (

I believe HN has a flame war detector that trips when the number of comments is greater than the number of votes, and pulls the submission off the front page. (I haven't looked, but this is probably what happened to the Google post as well.) Since it's back on the front page now, I'd guess that the HN mods decided that this was important and un-tripped the detector.