A rare example of words that do belong in CAPS. :-)
My one comment on the original note... I think an article that is written with the intention of being well done might be monetizable as a side effect, but I don't think the other is true. It's very hard for a low-value post with poor monetization to be voted up.
That's the kind of... sad? Part of HN. Hardly anything lives for more than a day on home page. And links on /new have a few hours and then they got lost.
Not sure about others but I personally tend to look at the posts which already have a vote or two, while skipping the ones which don't. Eh, social proof goes quite far.
I think there is an opportunity for a tool which would extract the keywords from the post (not the title) and would give me some content from /new which you wouldn't have discovered from top pages. Been thinking about it for a while, what do you reckon folks?
The post: http://www.stavros.io/posts/brilliant-or-insane-code/
I didn't have a blog at the time but wanted to write something to submit to HN so I set one up on Posterous and wrote my post. Ended up #1 for about 6 hours, and stayed on the front page for over 24 hours.
http://www.chrisacky.com/images/stats.png
But do you know what I loved the most...
After I wrote the content and submitted to HN, I took my dog for a half hour dog walk.. and came back to this.
http://www.chrisacky.com/images/trends.png
If you write anything, providing it's: original, interesting, controversial, echo-chamber'd or otherwise a decent news-scoop, you can usually get enough upvotes to make front page.
Unfortunately, I've found that the really technical posts which are awesome never seem to stick around for that long which is why it's good to check out /new every so often too.
IF YOU DON'T WRITE IT, THEY WON'T COME.
Everyone should have a blog, and providing it's not spam, you will be amazed at how easy it can be to get readers.