A lesser article gets, well, less hits... 1, 2, 3k, depending.
Here's a screenshot:
http://skitch.com/swombat/n9mrs/danieltenner.com-dashboard-c...
You can probably correlate those with article dates on my blog and find out how many votes translate to what level of traffic.
Edit: I wouldn't give so much weight to the HN RSS feed. Google Reader is by far the largest subscriber to my feed, and hits from there register as hits from google.com, not hits from news.ycombinator.com.
As you can easily see here: http://skitch.com/swombat/n9mfb/danieltenner.com-dashboard-c... the Google reader hits are a very small minority. Most people read HN on HN, not on the RSS feed. I guess the author uses the RSS feed and so gives it a disproportionate weight.
/r/programming on the other hand sent over 3800 visitors during a 3-day period.
Hope that helps!
To give you some perspective though the top bar in the graph was around 1,600 hits :) While I was on the 'new' page (but not yet on the RSS feed) the article had around 350 hits from HN.