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Comment by denzil_correa | Hacker News Reader

HN really amazes me sometimes. I posted the exact same article with the exact same title 12 days ago [0] and didn't receive much traction. In fact, the only comment on the submission read

    this should have landed on the front page...

Anyways, I wonder if there is any explanation of this phenomena.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6623501

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Anyways, I wonder if there is any explanation of this phenomena.

It's the basic principle in real-world science that for stuff, people get credited who didn't invent/discover it. That's the reason why your submission wasn't noticed; you simply would have had to wait for the Nth time around.

Didn't hit initial voting numbers to reach "escape velocity" from New->Hot.

Also consider it game theoretically -- that you're competing vs lots of articles... perhaps other articles at the time were more interesting/compelling.

It's just random variation. Depending on the time of day, you need maybe 4 or 5 upvotes to make the front page and escape the /newest ghetto; but there's not much traffic on /newest so it's very easy for articles to not escape one time even if they escape the other time.

It is fine really - I wonder if there was more than random to it. Anyways, now I have attracted downvotes for my initial comment. Kind of surprised at that too! :)

You were in the right place at the wrong time.

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