Hacking Y Combinator

This idea came to me out of the blue. I was scrolling through Y Combinator's Hacker News board in search of inspiration. I noticed that some posts (very insightful ones, I thought) ended up at the bottom of the list, other posts were popular but had no comments and some triggered lots of comments but were ranked very low. I can imagine that being popular on Hacker News means a lot to a contributor: s/he gets a ton of views, the post generates heated discussion and may encourage other people to share the content with others or reference it in their work. I knew this was my topic. I decided to find out how to become popular on Hacker News.