[lwneal]

This might just be HN's usual (although undocumented) behavior. See [1] for details.

One thing to keep in mind is that more comments is worse for ranking. Less controversial topics that get upvotes but no comments will tend to stay up for longer.

[1] https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

[bhj]

Yes, another good reason to use something like https://github.com/hnrss/hnrss instead of depending on a (very transitory) front page.