The new page is sorted by time, which was fine when there were a hundred posts a day, but now during busy periods a new link is only on the new page for maybe 30 minutes.
Most of the votes a link on the new page gets seem to occur when the link is one of the top 5-10 links. So in practice a link has ten minutes to get votes or it dies. So it comes down to the handful of people who read the new page in those ten minutes (I posted a link the other day, it had ten click throughs while it was on the new page and 3 upvotes; 1 more upvote would have pushed it to the front page).
I think HN needs to switch the new page to a "rising new" page (like Reddit uses), where links that have upvotes get to stick around longer on the new page than links without upvotes.