Cheating HN is something that comes with the growth. HN has enough traffic to attract all the people and companies that have or would like to have gamed reddit and before that digg, and plenty of companies are already doing their best to make sure they get their share of the traffic - Ziff Davis (ExtremeTech, Geek and PCMag), MacObserver, BGR etc all have multiple, undisclosed employees spamming HN.
Then there's the heavy/blind submitters who make damn sure whatever you submit isn't long for this world because it's super important we get everything straight from their feed reader, probably automatically for the heavier dudes.
Then there's the easy topics that get easy votes like TorrentFreak and TechDirt's constant manipulation, anything YC, and the endless soft-serve entrepreneur-porn written for HN just because it's got a good chance of being popular on HN.
The big difference is HN doesn't have reddit etc's resources to combat it, and on top of that as a marketing tool for YC startups it's rife with conflicts of interests as a democratic news site.
Then there's the heavy/blind submitters who make damn sure whatever you submit isn't long for this world because it's super important we get everything straight from their feed reader, probably automatically for the heavier dudes.
Then there's the easy topics that get easy votes like TorrentFreak and TechDirt's constant manipulation, anything YC, and the endless soft-serve entrepreneur-porn written for HN just because it's got a good chance of being popular on HN.
The big difference is HN doesn't have reddit etc's resources to combat it, and on top of that as a marketing tool for YC startups it's rife with conflicts of interests as a democratic news site.