At the moment, this post has 4 upvotes and yet it is in the #7 place on the front page of Hacker News. How is that possible? 4 upvotes gets a post that high on the front page?
It's Saturday afternoon in the US. Not exactly the busiest time for news. I don't know how Hacker News' ranking algorithm works, but I'd imagine it's possible to incorporate information like number of clicks in addition to upvotes and comments.
The main part of the order is base approximately in: votes/age^2
Some of the details are part of the secret sauce, but kens did a blackbox analysis to try to guess more details. It's an old post, so many details may have changed since it was published, but I guess the main ideas remain.
Quite impressive karma count for only having 10 comments. A zillion story submissions of which almost all are from nautil.us though. What's going on here?