I find the whole thing funny. There's not so much secret sauce going on here as much as you might think. I've been reading Daring Fireball for a long time but I think anytime you make this suggestion the automatic response is to think there is some shady cabal behind the scenes and that's just conspiracy theory stuff. Anytime someone makes a meta post questioning how HN ranks articles it almost always gets flagged because it's not really on topic.