Out of curiosity, are you keeping a log of popular HN posts or just remembering them and searching? You're always first on the scene and comprehensive, it seems.
I remember and search. My memory's pretty good, and my search-fu is also usually pretty good, although not always.
I'm currently looking at automating some of the process, but I do find that searching for stuff I think I remember occasionally turns up a gem I missed, and so I'm reluctant to automate it fully unless they still get found.
That's why I'm starting to feed items into a Bayesian classifier to find good stuff - by my standards and according to my interests. I continue to experiment.
I'd love to hear more details on your classifier. I've been interested in trying something like that for myself: a sort of automatic attention filter which brings both unmodeled outliers and probably-good articles to my attention.
