Front Page of Hacker News in 5 Easy Steps

He’s giving the table stakes, but there is some luck involved too. Also HN provides a decent amount of traffic for non first page asubmissions and if you are in a niche it can still be useful.

I think that the article itself explains why that is:

> No tips or tricks will replace writing something interesting or helpful.

Yet another article about how to get on the front page of HN isn't interesting. (Such articles appear often.) And most HN readers don't care about getting their post on the front page, so it's not really helpful to them.