But it doesn't mean we should upvote every hobbyist project to the top of hacker news - only the useful, interesting, good ones.

Use the search, 90% of them don't get voted up. I've worked for years on things in the dustbin of popularity

Exactly, and my point it that this particular clock belongs in the 90%, not the 10%.

Vote and rank systems are fairly crude. Delight often takes precedence over depth, it's why you don't see academic papers or open access books on the front page often...

I'm open to more nuanced and sophisticated rules, I've even built a few systems and tried to gain traction. However the crude single vote implements seem to be the only ones with staying power.

I dunno, every day is a new context we could simply try again. Things can fail a dozen times and then something changes and makes it work. (For instance, on demand video, or YouTube, only took off when people had broadband and speedy enough computers to watch the video, it was probably the 20th company that tried this idea and the first to not eat shit)