I think there's a rather large snowball effect in play here, and during the first hours of a post where the snowball should first form, there's massive randomne

I think there's a rather large snowball effect in play here, and during the first hours of a post where the snowball should first form, there's massive randomness in what activity will befall a post. The fact that an article is genuinely interesting doesn't guarantee it's spot on the front page, it just greatly increases it's odds. What is of more concern to me is that all of the front page articles are genuinely interesting. To me HN does pretty well in this regard. There are so many interesting things out there that it doesn't bother me if some of them slip through the cracks and never reach the HN frontpage.