I've always found the ranking mechanism on Hacker News to be somewhat opaque, especially with respect to posts which are flagged. Sufficient flagging can kill a post in the official sense, but what seems to happen more often is that a post receives one or two flags and then gets aggressively down-ranked and dropped so far down on the popular articles feed (three or four pages or more) that it might as well be dead. I've both flagged and vouched submissions in the past, and I can say that some submissions definitely deserve to get flagged into oblivion. The call on a lot of other submissions is more subjective however. So sometimes I'd like to get a view of currently popular submissions without flagging taken into account. It turns out there's an easy way to do that.
Algolia's Hacker News search page (https://hn.algolia.com) provides a way to search popular articles within a date range. One of the pre-canned options is the last 24 hours, which provides a view similar to Hacker New's front page, but not identical. In particular it seems rank submissions purely by upvotes.