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It is on the requested features list

one of our developers built a local emulated simpledb clone for development/testing that is open sourced at:

Since HN doesn't show vote totals I wanted to chime in and say this would be really useful to me as well.

HN doesn't show vote totals, but it does sort posts based on the number of votes (descending), so the more popular posts rise to the top, just like the front page.

That isn't how the frontpage works, and if it did, we would rarely have news turnover.

Well, yes and no. Upvotes push submissions toward the top of the page, but the ranking algorithm also includes a decay factor so that old articles eventually fall away.

HN most likely uses a combination of votes and time in scoring, similar to the reddit ranking algorithm: http://amix.dk/blog/post/19588