Broadly, posts and comments rise with more upvotes, and sink with both downvotes and time-elapsed. There are also penalties, such as when a post has 40 points or more, but more comments than points. That's a "Flame war penalty". There are others.
There's more scattered about on HN itself, just do a search for "HN Rankings":
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 16.9 ms ] threadhttps://jacquesmattheij.com/the-unofficial-hn-faq/
Here is the official FAQ:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
Broadly, posts and comments rise with more upvotes, and sink with both downvotes and time-elapsed. There are also penalties, such as when a post has 40 points or more, but more comments than points. That's a "Flame war penalty". There are others.
There's more scattered about on HN itself, just do a search for "HN Rankings":
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&query=hn%20rankings&so...
Here's one:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13613047