Besides moderator involvement, it's not an obscure algorithm so much as people clicking the vote button and this counter being divided by the post's age to keep the page fresh. People like yourself are what decide what makes it onto the homepage.
HN has had thousands of posts like this by someone making something that was interesting to them and sharing it with others. That's part of the hackers ethos.
I wouldn't consider myself a developer or programmers, but more on the support side. I've made little tools like this when trying to figure out what's going with our proprietary software. By setting up 'fake' servers that dump as much debug information as possible you can get a lot of useful information. Especially when the application developer decides not to put functionality like that in the product in the first place.
This audience understands how hard it is to actually make a thing, get it out there in the world, share it, and brace for impact for the inevitable criticism.
Someone made a thing and put it out in the world. Worthy of some upvotes in my view.