Semi-related, but is there some friendly algorithm behind the scenes at HN that resubmits articles if they go flying off /newest without a lot of attention? I submitted a blog post last week that made it to the front page, but its path there was kind of odd. I had submitted it the night before and watched it scroll listlessly off the first page of /newest. The next morning, it was on the front page with a posted time of "5 hours ago", probably a good 8 hours after I originally posted it.
There is! Humans find them and software reposts them. It's called the second-chance pool and is described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 and various links back from there. There are so many good submissions that get overlooked by the randomness of the initial traction wave—especially the quieter, offbeat kind, which often are the best kind of submission for HN, uncorrelated with anything else. I sometimes email people to let them know their post will be re-upped, but it looks like I didn't do that in your case.
By the way, if anyone sees that kind of post languishing without attention, please let us know at hn@ycombinator.com. It's clear that many if not most are still getting missed, and curiosity is what we're optimizing for, so we love getting those emails. One day we're going to write software to make this system more formal and open it to everyone.
A few days ago I saw a post dated an hour ago, with comments from "7 minutes ago" - when I swear I saw the same post with the exact same comments hours before.
It happened to me too, submitted the link, tail -f httplog | grep blogpost, the usual bots, one to three up-votes, then it fell off the "newest". Left the terminal open and went on with work. When I was about to close down all open terminals and go home for the day, I noticed there was traffic! So I quickly checked HN and there it was, my post on the front page! I was so euphoric I couldn't prepare the dinner, walking around in circles, putting the plates in the refrigerator instead of the table, etc. Biggest surprise was there was mostly Macbooks, and also quite a lot of RSS readers in the User-agent.
