There is a new feature on HN these days to fix this: If a post get upvotes later, it will often be given a second chance to ‘try to shine’ to the front page.
With this comment I think it was to hard for people to understand in the first place.
It's not if a post gets upvotes later, but rather if a moderator or a small number of story reviewers notice that it was a good post that didn't get attention. We've been doing it for quite a while now https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380. The long term plan is still to open this up to all users, not just a few, but we still haven't figured out a good way to do that.
