I don’t think that will scale, but if a story is legitimately interesting and your email is short, you might find it’s given preference.
The full-time goal of HN is to stay interesting at every timestep. A lot of the reason people’s interesting stories don’t get upvoted is that there are so many interesting stories to talk about each day, and there are 30 slots on the front page. Interesting discussions also take time to foster, so you have to give content a little bit of time to accumulate well-written comments, which necessarily appear 30 minutes to several hours after hitting the front page.
Ultimately it’s an interesting intellectual exercise to analyze HN like this, but probably not too useful. The data hides the underlying fact that HN is fine-tuned to be interesting. Just be interesting, and eventually you’ll get a slot. It’s as easy and as hard as that.