Forgot to mention, but "I was on the HN frontpage for X hours and got X views" doesn't always translate to the same happening for everything. Some topics are more interesting to the people just browsing HN, than others. I'd expect an article titled "I spent $6 Million On Google Ads Last Year" to be significantly less interesting than "MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge and IT admins are angry" for example, where the latter would surely gather a magnitude of more visits than the earlier, even if they would spend the same amount of hours on the frontpage.
Some content is simply more interesting for a broader audience.