>no amount of upvotes could bring any old post back to frontpage No practical amount, at least. I wouldn't be surprised if the weight function used to sort t

>no amount of upvotes could bring any old post back to frontpage No practical amount, at least. I wouldn't be surprised if the weight function used to sort the stories had no hard cutoff based on time, so you could beat it in theory if not in practice if you upvoted an old story at a sufficient rate. You could call it "story escape velocity". Of course, for stories old enough the escape velocity may not be achievable due the limited bandwidth and other resources that HN has even if you had enough users trying to upvote it.