No, but I see signs of something odd happening. Will investigate.

Somehow the top stories stopped getting sorted. In the past there have been bugs that caused the thread that resorts the frontpage to stop working. Presumably it was another one, but this time the cause was gone by the time I looked. I resorted the top few pages manually. I hope they will now stay sorted.

I remember that a certain someone did a demonstration of the power of a repl on a production system.

Unrelated? :-)

Does the fact that this 791 day old story made the front page again fit with what you're suspecting?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=872283

Once resorting breaks, anything that gets upvoted can get stuck on the frontpage.

Looking at position 26/27

  Poll: Should we rename Amber.js?
  34 points by wycats 20 hours ago | flag | 54 comments	

  Ask HN: know of any successful app in Google marketplace?
  8 points by vijayr 22 hours ago | flag | discuss

A few minutes again there was an "Ask HN" story in that position (26) which was sent 22 hours ago too. That might give you a clue.

Some old stories show number of comments while some don't. Could that be related?

My data shows that the stories on the front page had unusual high scores last night.

they sure have a lot of points in relation to the ewest items. Might be a devaluation of the amount of points due to an increase in users/votes ?

What really happened aboard Air France 447 (popularmechanics.com) 824 points by fr0sty 2 days ago | 355 comments

I have been here for a long time and I don't remember seeing a 1 day old post in the front page unless it has something like 700 or 900 points. Also posts without URL generally get quickly buried after they hit the front page and don't show up again.

Earlier I'm pretty sure I saw a 797-day old post on the front page about Github switching to Unicorn. I figured it was some kind of coordinated practical joke by people who were upvoting it.

There was a post like 55 days old that somehow was on the first page.