No, that's not how it works, sadly. HN is explicitly curated, so some posts get bumped/nerfed by moderators. Also the "natural" rank seems to be a lot more comp

No, that's not how it works, sadly. HN is explicitly curated, so some posts get bumped/nerfed by moderators. Also the "natural" rank seems to be a lot more complicated than just upvotes over time. There are a lot of companies trying to game HN to get more eyeballs. If it were as simple as "number of upvotes per hour" HN would be full of blogspam. EDIT: Case in point: the link just dropped off the frontpage extremely quickly. I'm guessing a moderator penalised it.