Odd, posted this yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17576304

HN is notoriously fickle. The same story can get 0 upvotes, then be submitted by someone else in a couple hours and then garner hundreds of points.

How? When I post something and it happens to be recently posted, it automatically becomes an upvote. I'm generally fine with it, except when it has 1-5 votes and will never see the front page.

HN has so many secret behaviour that it became boring by now. I don't think I will bother posting a story again, because it's very hard to get some discussion to happen around a post (which is the whole point of posting a link for me), whereas in most Reddit subs, even if your post is in the -1 to 1 votes range, you can still get useful answers or interesting comments.

It seems that sometimes, high karma accounts can submit a dupe. But I don't think it always works. Maybe it's a lower dupe submission check timeout.

As for submissions, I'd recommend trying to land in the American morning/early European afternoon. That's when most people seem to browse and thus you have a better chance of getting upvoted to the front page.

You may also be interested in this: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented