To simplify, lots of votes in a short time gets the article to the top, unless penalties kick in. If you're interested in the HN scoring algorithm, I wrote abou

To simplify, lots of votes in a short time gets the article to the top, unless penalties kick in. If you're interested in the HN scoring algorithm, I wrote about it in 2013: http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really-works.html http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really... Some changes have been made to the algorithm since then, but it's still roughly accurate.