HN is full of spam and has been for years. There are more spam submissions in /newest than non-spam. Thankfully pg and the other moderators are swift in implementing tools to blast spam accounts and urls.

HN has a pagerank of 7. I'm currently running an anti-spam experiment with a guestbook on a PR 4 website; it gets 300 spams an hour.

Try setting showdead to on for a while. Or just hang out on "new".