This is a common idea, and it is a super-hard problem. Sites like Reddit are increasingly sampling by throwing more new posts into hot. That is a solution that may improve yet not really change HN. Ultimately, we don't all want the same feeds and user majorities tend to stifle key minorities such as early adopters.

I'm building such a system for prizeforge and am several more steps ahead on this solution. You need a decent background in probability and a more robust understanding of what a "good" outcome is to work on this kind of thing. https://positron.solutions/careers if you do Rust and care a whole lot about this problem and can deal with the challenges we're going to have with PrizeForge.