This is a nice analysis, although the causes of a high points per minute score could presumably be related to whether it gained an early vote / comment from a user with high karma (who is effectively giving it a stamp of approval).
This only had two points on 20 minutes when I voted for it though, so by their own logic is unlikely to make it to the FP!
Hah, good point! Much to my chagrin, the theory I proposed is challenged by my own post. It looks like someone with a lot of karma can boost a post to the front page (there are some outliers in the analysis). Maybe we can get individual votes exposed via the API to know for sure.
There's more details on the technical setup behind WriteLaTeX (in particular the use of docker) in this slide deck by John L-M: http://jdlm.info/ds-docker-demo/#18
This only had two points on 20 minutes when I voted for it though, so by their own logic is unlikely to make it to the FP!