It's not hard to get stuff on the front page. Make a reasonably nice project, get a designer friend to do a landing page. Then let 10 of your friends know beforehand, get a commitment for upvotes.
Post it, get your friends to upvote it (DO NOT send them a direct link, the HN spam system picks that up, they need to find it themselves on the new page).
This will buy you maybe like 30 minutes on the frontpage, from there something lame will drop, something decent will stick for a few hours, and something more awesome/controversial can stay all day.
I've been directly involved in like 3 of these (as landing page designer), and an "upvoting friend" in maybe about 10. YC companies do this (I was surprised at first, I thought they got a magic orange YC upvote button).
Extra Credit: A "midbrow dismissal" in the comments that is then debunked in a condescending/clever response can be helpful.
