I've been wondering for a while... on the downloads link there are two ways of looking at apps, 'fresh' and 'hot'
I'm assuming fresh is simply the most recently updated in extras.

However I cannot for the life of me figure out how 'hot' is calculated. the show information about an app is it's current star rating, the number of votes and the number of downloads.
However no combination I can figure out of using these numbers makes sense looking at the order actually shown.
eg some apps appear high up even with lower counts in all of those categories that apps that come later.
I'm just curious if anyone has insight into how 'hot' is determined.

Counting currently "hot" applications

To make a dynamic listing of applications that are "hot right now", we need to store some additional download statistics per application:

Total amount of downloads
Average downloads per day during last week
Yesterday's downloads
These can then be used to calculate whether an application is getting more downloads on a given day than usual, meaning that it is "currently hot".

This should be possible to count via:

current karma = (yesterday's karma - age modifier) + (total download count - yesterdays downloadcount - lastweeks daily average)

Source.

Thanks for that.
So it seems to me that HOT is relatively similar to 'fresh' in the sense that it is swayed by how recently a new release was pushed. And this is not the same as 'popular' in the sense of enduring popularity, ranked by stars/downloads etc.
But at least I can now make sense of what controls the ordering. So thanks again!