Remember that being at the top of the front page at some point during the day does not necessarily mean that an article is in the top 10 links for the day.

I think looking at scores -- without looking at how long it took for those scores to be reached -- probably weights in favour of more "interesting" stories and against link-bait stories, simply because the link-bait tends to accumulate most of its votes very quickly.

So the derivative in respect to points over time of the link bait story would be much higher than non link bait story?

I think link-bait stories probably peak earlier.

Out of curiosity, I just ran the numbers for Love in the age of the pickup artist. Right now, at 15:00, it's in 6th place; I suspect that by the end of the day it will fall past 10th place, since these last 9 hours are probably when the most votes are cast and that link isn't getting many votes any more.

So that story is probably a perfect illustration of when sorting by highest score alone is better than HN's score-per-time measure.