Unofficially defining "significant attention" from the above quoted FAQ
entry as
_currently_ being "more than 15 points or more than 5
comments" (and posted within the last year) was told to me by email. If
you
absolutely need official confirmation, then you'll need to email
our fearless HN dev/admin Daniel (hn {at} ycombinator {dot} com) as
requested in the site Guidelines.
The rule is unwritten for a reason; it may change without notice, and it
most likely will change eventually. As HN grows and changes, both the HN
forum software and people who run HN try to adjust accordingly.
It's difficult to show the work involved with keeping HN clean, since
any details posted would just be abused to game the system. By default,
killed comments and stories are hidden, so you'd need to turn on
"showdead" in your HN profile to even see the junk. Since the junk is
hidden, it's are not indexed by search engines, and hence, it can't be
found with common search engines. The associated Algolia HN Search
powering the search box on the bottom of most HN pages also deletes the
junk, eventually, even though it might initially index and show it for a
short time.
The "News-To-Me" and related "Nobody-Noticed" problems turn out to be
horrendously difficult when you ponder them in depth. Every discussion
system is subject to attempts to game the system. Some attempt to gain
magic imaginary Internet points, or improve their reputation, or promote
of their content and comments. Others try to suppress and demote bad
news, or technologies they don't like. There are rings, bots, and
similar user clusters using voting, flagging and submitting in attempts
to manipulate results.
Merging all of the related submission links into the active submission
on a general "story" topic (e.g. all of the recent Pluto related news
stories) has been mentioned numerous times, but it is far more difficult
than it seems at first glance. A blogspam link to a Pluto story should
definitely not be merged with links to stories from NASA, BBC, NYT, and
other original and reputable sources. Your idea of "merge and share the
imaginary Internet point rewards" would unfortunately fail. Abusive
people would game it immediately. Also, it would be a ton of mostly
manual work sifting the good from the crud, and dealing with the usual
complaints.