HackerNews is often referred to as the Reddit for the startup community.
It has typically been associated with developers, startup geeks and hackers. While this is true, you shouldn't forget that people have multiple interests and you'd be surprised what can get this community galvanized.
For example, I decided to setup a salsa of the month club one day. I then made a basic landing page using Unbounce and published it to HackerNews with the title "Show HN: Salsa-as-a-Service landing page"…10 minutes later I hit the front page, drove 5k+ views, 100+ emails to my landing page all within under 20 minutes. I ended up doing even more within a few hours until I finally was taken over by more recent post.
Pure luck? No. Well, yes, a little, but I did optimize for this to happen. How?
1. I used "Show HN:" in my title. This alerts the community that I need feedback, which drives more click throughs on my link. Also, it puts the post in another section called "Ask" so I can essentially stay relevant on HN for longer. This also works with "Ask HN:"
2. I posted during the morning, at around 10:30am EST on a Wednesday. Ok, maybe that's overkill, but I, along with others, have noticed that between 7-11am EST on weekdays posts generally drive more traffic, which means you have a greater chance of hitting the front page and your "tipping point".
3. I got a little creative with my title, "Salsa-as-a-Service". This was a play on words to the startup community audience, since a "Software-as-a-Service" is a widely adopted business model by startups that allows customers to pay for access to specific digital tools/resources.
Although I personally do not employ this tactic, you can apply pure brute force to HackerNews by alerting your friends/co-workers/anyone with a HN account to "up-vote" your post. However, you have to be careful…
-DO NOT send them the direct link to your post. HN will discredit the vote.
-Also, make sure your friend doesn't just up vote without clicking through. Encourage them to maybe click through on a few posts and up vote 1-2 others in addition to yours. HN is very, very quick and tech savvy. Be extra careful.
If all else fails, you can go into your submissions, delete your original submission, and try it again. You cannot submit the same link more than once, and sometimes you just need to try it a couple times. If after the third or fourth time it doesn't work, well, then it's probably because of your product or because HN is just not the right audience for you.