Lots of discussion here about this approach and alternatives. Not sure how feasible this is but I think it would be even cooler to turn this into a site where users can define their own custom ranking algorithm and/or select from a set of available algorithms (including the one you're currently using). Maybe even provide a meta-ranking of the most popular ranking algorithms?
Yes we'd like to do that, but the main problem is that we don't have access to some data that goes into HN rankings: flags, penalties, and other moderator actions. These make a huge difference to the quality of front-page content.
But we have thought of allowing users to provide this data on our site. They could flag posts, mark them as duplicate, mark them as being non-technical (HN mods regularly apply penalties to popular news items that are not really about hacking and startups), etc.
