My highest rated HN link was a sarcastic troll post about the MacBook Touch Bar in 2016. Nothing I have written since has even gotten close to the same level of attention. Someone reposted a more recent article from my blog over the weekend that gathered 4 upvotes and a few hundred views. It's nice to be noticed but I don't live for attention.
I think that unless you want to form a cabal to get something on the front page, there is a great deal of luck in what takes off on HN (and other similar sites). Unless a post quickly gets those all-important few dozen upvotes it will languish on the second or third page wastelands.
Looks like the best way to accumulate kudos is to have a bot that watches for new announcements from Apple, OpenAI, etc and then immediately submits the links to HN.
I think that unless you want to form a cabal to get something on the front page, there is a great deal of luck in what takes off on HN (and other similar sites). Unless a post quickly gets those all-important few dozen upvotes it will languish on the second or third page wastelands.