This is not strictly true, position is based on a lot of factors.
Note that this is not what I said. I just said that votes are not the only factor.
> On the front page, by points divided by a power of the time since they were submitted. Comments in comment threads are ranked the same way.
http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
Now, HN runs on a slightly modified version of news.arc, so we can't be 100% for sure. pg did give the formula a long time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781417
TL;DR: time since the comment was left is often a factor.
Because I'm done with these people bashing these events. Either they're highly-advanced trolls and we're all getting played REALLY HARD or these people are serious; if the latter then as far as I'm concern they're just awful people not much better than the folks at stormfront.org. I think any reasonable person understands it would be a waste of time trying to argue with stormfront.org members... and I'm just about ready to mentally tag these HN comments with the same level of lunacy & bigotry.
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Preemptive: And yes, I know one of you is going to come along and throw the definition of bigotry back in my face. I don't care. I refuse to consider the ridiculous points of view I've been seeing on these gender stories in the same way I refuse to consider stormfront.org. You're all just trolls or really awful people. The end. I'm just super-happy that Ycombinator officially supports & organizes these kind of event to show YC is above your nonsense.