I think we're not being let in on a silent war happening here. It seems bogus points are being assigned to submissions and they are then being killed. It started several hours ago.
This is most likely what's happening. I submitted an interesting book review. The kind that would get routinely ignored on HN. It immediately got 8 points. Very odd. I expect it to die any time now.
I've rarely had submissions killed. But I was surprised when mine got ten points within moments of posting it. That made me suspicious and since then it's the likely reason for submissions being killed: Someone is giving everything bogus points.
You guys are more on the ball than I am. When my post got instant upvotes I thought, "How pleasant that so many people are interested in dataflow computation".
Probably HN's software is detecting the suspicious voting and killing the posts.
It went up like a rocket and disappeared just as fast. I didn't submit it so I have no clue whether or not the submitter gamed the system but it sure looked weird.
Given the subject of this thread that's actually an on-topic link :)
See first hints here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3788069
And someone else noticed: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3788740