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.