Ah okay so the popularity list of interesting links in HN is not only user driven, as I initially thought (except for rule violations), but also mod driven.
I’ve seen dang explain it before, although I don’t remember exact details. I think they’ll just give interesting links a bump every now and then if they didn’t get a fair shot for whatever reason.
> We started doing this because it turned out that if you lob a story onto the front page with an old (say "2 days ago") timestamp, the thread will turn into "how is this story on the front page when it was posted 2 days ago".
I'm not sure if it's the right approach to edit timestamps, sounds like a hack to me.