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Everything is luck, and everything isn't luck. I make the comparison talking about my app business. Making a great app is like buying a lottery ticket that happ

Everything is luck, and everything isn't luck. I make the comparison talking about my app business. Making a great app is like buying a lottery ticket that happens to have an expected outcome of greater than 0. The better you make the app, the more likely it is to succeed. If it's a great app, it will make some money, but to have a hit you also have to have a lot of luck. You pretty much can't have a hit though without making it good. It's the same with a post on HN. You have to actually have good content, but that is not enough to guarantee the front page. You have to have good content, and you have to get lucky. I've had stuff get near the top of the front page and get > 15k views and I've had similar content fall off the new page with just a few views and no votes. As with the apps though, you can't have hit if it's crap. You have to be good and lucky.

_greim_ 13y ago
The word "luck" suggests a chaotic nature to the outcomes; the initial conditions being the time of day of the post, the first few up/down votes, what people are online and browsing at the moment. Of course controlling for quality content, as you say. But there might also be some intrinsic aspect to successful posts that's hard to analyze and replicate and that is entirely orthogonal to quality, such that that post would have made it to the popular page even under different initial conditions. So it's "luck" in the sense that it hits some sweet spot in the fractal plane of our imagination.