Ask HN: How do time, karma, etc., affect position of comments and posts?

You could look at the source, but chances are these elements are part of the 'secret sauce' and the exact parameters in service on the site may be different from those in the source.

The only person that can answer this is PG, but the ingredients are apparently average score in the previous 'x' comments by the same poster, points on the comment, age of the comment.

Maybe it has come on a bit but..

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/reddit-stumbleupon-delicious-and-...

More interesting than this would be to have data for every vote given. There'd be some great data mining projects in there. What time of day do certain topics work better, etc.

http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html