But it sounds as if you might not be even seeing the front page. Click on "Hacker News" not "new". The latter is just a list of all articles that get submitted, many of which haven't made it to the front page yet.
To get it to the front page it should be on topic, it must have a catchy enough title that people will want to click on it, and the article itself has to be interesting enough that people will upvote it. I think there is a slight disadvantage for articles that are really interesting and take a long time to read, as by the time people have finished reading them, they will have already fallen off the edge of the world. But no one ever claimed the world was fair (I believe it is almost universally accepted that it is not flat though).