Hacker News is fickle, but you can kind of guess what it wants. Based on my own experience, a post about making the Objective-C runtime faster that leads with a meh title and x86 assembly is not really too likely to do very well: it’s hard for people to relate to. But a satire post on something people can understand? That can get a thousand upvotes in a few hours. (Probably even more, if it didn’t disappear from the front page suddenly in what I’d guess is downranking based on the lack of interesting content…) Post something people know about and discussion will tend to the most general thing in the article, and you’ll get upvotes from the people who can find those keywords. If you don’t provide that, then it’s much harder to do well even though the quality of your post might be higher.
