You might be surprised how much stuff you miss on HN. At least I am, and there can't be many people who monitor it more than I do (at least I hope there aren't! as I'm paid to). If you look at the front page links on past days (https://news.ycombinator.com/front, linked as 'past' in the top bar), you'll see that there are a lot of significant front page stories in a day. You need to click "More" at the bottom at least once or twice to see them all.

It's actually kind of a shocking exercise to do, because it brings home how there is no "real" HN - we all think we're seeing "the" front page, but it's a Heraclitus (Heraclitian?) river.

> doesn't some stories with a 5-600 hundred upvotes linger on the front page for days?

That should be very rare. The software downweights any story that has been on the front page for more than 15 hours, unless we specifically tell it not to (which we might do if the community was particularly enjoying it). If the upvotes are massive enough, a story can linger on the front page despite that penalty, but then moderators will notice it and push it below the front page.

> do you have time to explain why I can find a <700 points story here the next day but not this one?

I have time, but I don't understand the question!