HN's algorithms make no sense to me, either. I submitted this story the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10561347

It goes nowhere. Someone with higher karma submits the exact same article with the exact same headline about two hours later, and it winds up on the front page of HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10562207

The fact that they use their own karma system to automatically rank certain trusted users who might have done things like invent entire programming languages or started up 10 billion dollar companies ahead of random "asshats" who hang around HN is not very surprising in my opinion ;)

(edit: Whoever downvoted this, I was responding to someone who goes by the name AdmiralAsshat, and I was obviously joking. But that might just be HN automatically downvoting people for using words like asshat. In which case, HN is being a pure asshat.)

I'm not sure exactly how it works, but I think it works better than the old mostly luck system did.

Mods look at every submission, I think.