[sxg]

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.

[nitrogen]

There's probably an age-of-post component as well so new content has a chance to be seen.

[gus_massa]

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.

http://www.righto.com/2009/06/how-does-newsyc-ranking-work.h...

http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really...