While I appreciate your intent and effort - I don't think it's actually useful to link to other submissions unless either they have comments (ideally only if there's at least one interesting comment, but at least more than no comments at all), or if it's a submission of the same subject but to a different source link - in which case it's probably more useful to just link the alternative source, if it's worth reading, rather than potentially split the discussion into separate comment threads if the other is empty.
Linking to a different submission of the same link with 0 comments doesn't add anything.
Sure or just random luck, maybe this submission just happened to take place when the only few people who care about this subject happened to come online, or vice versa for bad luck before etc.
But unlike sites like Reddit, with the exception of self / ask HN / etc posts, nobody really pays attention to who the submitter is, so enjoy the conversation finally breaking out on it as consolation for not getting karma points, but skip linking to dead submissions :)
FYI, if you ever submit something that fails to get any traction / upvotes, then I've seen mods say before (@dang will hopefully correct me if I'm wrong) that a) it's OK to try submitting a second time maybe after a day or so (but not keep submitting over and over) or b) send the mods an email with a brief reason why it's a link that should interest HN readers for it to be potentially added to a "second chance pool". Though in the case of this link, between three of you it was posted two days ago, one day ago, and today which has finally got a bit more notice, so worked out alright in the end :)
Linking to a different submission of the same link with 0 comments doesn't add anything.