Judging from my upvotes the best way to go about it is to go to a popular comment in an over-crowded thread and leave your short, witty and unoffending thoughts. This method is probably the most time efficient. Spray and pray.
Submit content suited to the site, as per Hacker News guidelines. Hopefully if you've been there a while you are aware of this, but here it is again just in case: Hacker News Guidelines.
The first two paragraphs in the guidelines sum it all up:!<p>On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.<p>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Timing. I don't live in the US myself, and since roughly half of the site's users are in the US, the time of day makes a big difference in seeing your submission hitting the front page or floating to the bottom.