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Comment by throwawaythat1 | Hacker News Reader

This is OT but how come submissions which have less than 12 points appear on the first page? Has anyone figured out the HN algo? There are many other posts with far greater points yet this appears. Maybe techcrunch has higher ratings?

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It has a time decaying value function. If the points accumulate rapidly upon submission, you can reach front page with as few as 5 up votes. This often happens for github repo submissions.

This is the correct answer.

Does it stay on the front page with so few votes?

This sounds trivially gameable by voting rings.

No, it'll melt and quickly fall off the front page if it doesn't get more votes in an appropriate amount of time.

It's not trivial to game over time. HN has been very successfully handling attempts at gaming for years. If it didn't, the site wouldn't function at all given its traffic, it would be overwhelmed with crap 24/7.

Though being on front page dramatically heightens the possibility of getting further clicks (without any gaming).

I can't remember where dang explained this, but there is a human factor in the algorithm. Some posts are artificially bumped to low on the front page for a small period of time to see if they gain traction. The selection of those posts is up to the moderators. This might be one such post.

EDIT: As I recall, the human-curated selections get put in a pool which the computer randomly promotes for a time to see if it gains traction.

Notably, the user that posted the article has 47,000+ karma. I imagine that's a factor

Speaking as a user with 37,000+ karma, no, not that I am aware of.

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