With the high frequency of posts on HN, I can imagine a post on HN not making it "big" even if it's good. Digg, Reddit and other democratic content sites suffer from the same problem. They don't guarantee that all good posts will be at the top. They only guarantee that all the posts at the top are good. Most of the time, the good stuff gets enough up-votes to have the same behavior reinforced.

I wonder if spending some of your karma to the post would help. Though, I see no dearth of hackers here with a ton of karma, so it would have to be substantial "price" to make that worthwhile.