Counting the jumps down the home page. Would be nice if PG could confirm this either way (right or wrong), but I'm fairly sure that's what it is. It wouldn't make sense any other way (it was this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1759548 ) it got to the first spot on the homepage very quickly and then dropped in six steps off the homepage.
19 points, six steps, that's averaging 3 points per step, so it's like a single flag counts for 3 'downvotes' on an article or something close to that.
