But, does anybody else use "upvotes vs # of comments" as a useful metric around here? I'm not actually running a tally but I believe this story takes the cake, at least over the last few weeks (months?) with currently 750 upvotes vs only 70 comments.
In short, I find the number of upvotes divided by the number of comments (or perhaps minus the number of comments) a better metric to determine the "interestingness" of a story compared to the number of upvotes alone. It's not a hard-and-fast rule, but I've noticed myself paying more attention to this dividend/sum recently than to the points alone.
I've pondered the thought a little bit over the past few months and of course there are several factors at play here, so there's not one single explanation for the phenomenon. But here is one shot:
When somebody comments on a story, there's an incentive to also upvote it because of the karma system: the more upvotes a story gets that you've commented on, the higher the likelihood that your comment gets upvoted. Perhaps not everybody thinks like that, but I think it's fair to say that a good percentage of commenters might upvote a story for their comment's sake and not necessarily for the story's sake. (Of course that's simplifying things: when you comment on a story, you probably also find the story interesting so you might have upvoted it anyway, karma or not.)
Anyway, from that perspective, the difference between number of upvotes and number of comments could be termed "genuine upvotes": people who really just thought it was a cool story, without any second thoughts regarding their karma balance and without necessarily having a strong opinion on the subject matter.
There are of course other, and perhaps simpler, factors/explanations: the less comments a story gets, the less controversial it is so if a story gets many upvotes and few comments, then perhaps it simply is uncontroversially good.
I've played with the idea of writing an alternate HN interface that uses this metric to weigh stories, but it never got anywhere. And there certainly isn't a simple solution: how to combine age, upvotes and number of comments into a useful ranking is black magic at best.
Again sorry for this offtopic blurb. It's just something I found myself thinking about a bit, and this story seems like a particularly good example.
And now back to 3d-inspired 2d awesomeness. How come I've never thought of this!