The entire premise of this section is incorrect. There is no such thing as "enough votes to make it the front-page". There's no single threshold, nor is the value of a single vote constant. You're going to have a lot of other effects like specific domains having score penalties, votes being ignored due to them appearing to be fraudulent / non-organic, or the votes arriving too diffuse over a long time period. (Duplicates of the same URL will count as a vote for something like 12 hours after submission, so it's quite easy for a link to get a long tail of votes even after dropping out from the first page of /new.)

I would bet that most of what they claimed made it to the front-page never did. There used to be some HN stat-tracking sites around that had the full ranking history of submissions. Joining against that data would be a lot more credible.

> To achieve this goal, the new-page should expose every submission to a certain amount of views, to estimate its eligibility for the front-page.

That is obviously unworkable. /new is a slush pile, 90% of the submissions do not deserve even a single view based on the title. The proposal ensures that people visiting /new will only see the obvious garbage that nobody else has clicked on either.