You might be right but... I've seen too many anti-Microsoft cnet submits hit the front-page for cnet to have anything but a positive weight on HN. Also duplica

You might be right but... I've seen too many anti-Microsoft cnet submits hit the front-page for cnet to have anything but a positive weight on HN. Also duplicates and shorts and blog-spam hits front page all the time. And I don't see anything to indicate that Author having a negative weight here. As for all the other referenced submits, they were automatically dead-on-arrival. And I'd imagine whatever happened to my account, happened right-on, or right-before the last good submit. I do remember that my "H.265 is so slow that it's impossible to even test (multimedia.cx)" went to the front-page quickly, and while completely accurate, was flagged off quickly because some people in the comments decided that because it was 2 years old it was no longer valid, and clicked the flag button (which is quite effective at taking submits off front-page). In combination with that, I'll admit I had 1 or 2 front-page hitting submits disappear before too. And that could be the reason, but I can only guess, and not knowing why your penalized, or what you can do about it, really sucks. P.S., that's a really nice 'Star Trek' engine article, you should submit it. I'll upvote it.