[slaven]

What you post on HN matters a great deal: when we had a general start-up related article hit the front page we got traffic but few leads (like in OP's example).

But when we launched an interesting feature and hit the front page -- with the story's title obviously aimed at our target market of app publishers -- we got massive amount of leads as well.

[JeremyKolb]

I've experienced the same thing, off of 1,300 visits for an off topic article we got about 7 leads. When we posted something clearly targeting our market our conversion rate jumped to around 10%