How about you let HN users choose what algo they want like how they choose their header Color.
I will probably go as far as saying that no web based forum has come even close to producing a online group discussion UX as good as what Usenet readers used to have.
Or maybe send the entire list of links of the day to the client and sort it using JavaScript provided by the user
Would be an interesting experiment, maybe they've tried it before?
You can imagine someone writing a clever query to extract hashed passwords or something from different tables. Also with the amount of traffic HN gets the front page is probably cached - running a query for every single request sounds expensive.
It would be very cool if possible tho.