My theory is that it highly depends on the few random people who view New posts and if they upvote/comment.
The exact same post with the exact same title can either be completely ignored with no comments and no upvotes or be the top post with 500 upvotes and 300 comments.
Exactly. Depending on the traffic in newest, stories can slip in disappear in the flow
I think just like how new comments can go to the top of a post, I think HN should change the algorithm such that new posts can sometimes go to the top of HN as a way to quickly test if the post is worthy or not.
A lot of high quality posts have 0 upvote and 0 comment.