This post was penalized by the voting ring detector, but we turned that off because we want to see original work on HN and because there's a genuine discussion here.
All: please don't try to promote your submissions to HN by getting friends to upvote them. If friends are trying to do you a favor, try to call them off. The HN software identifies most of this as voting ring activity and penalizes the story.
My guess is that it detects natural access to the post by browsing new/top etc. versus direct link access followed by a vote and disconnect plus perhaps some vote distribution detection (i.e. a cluster of direct access votes indicates a ring)
I imagine full disclosure would simply encourage more sophisticated voting rings :P
All: please don't try to promote your submissions to HN by getting friends to upvote them. If friends are trying to do you a favor, try to call them off. The HN software identifies most of this as voting ring activity and penalizes the story.