[brudgers]

Keep in mind that flagging drags a story down.

In my experience, story quality plays a big role and luck a somewhat smaller one. Because what makes a story good on Hacker News can be a bit different than what makes it good on other sites someone with 2000 karma is probably more likely to submit a better story -- e.g. right now this submission about a fourteen year old Linux text book: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11352295 is on the front page -- simply based on the likelihood of greater engagement and more experience.

My observation is that many stories that get 100 upvotes in an hour generate low quality discussions and disappear due to flagging, though there are exceptions.

My unsolicited advice is to write good comments and post good articles and not get to tangled up in trying to optimize around timing.

Good luck.