Naw, the voting anti-spam algos on HN are pretty good. I have a slight vested interest, but I don't really want bitcoins to go up any more for a while, I'd rather it stabled out and people started building real apps with them. With the growth rate of the currency as it is, it is hard to justify building a BTC app when I could just contract out at $100/hr and then convert that into bitcoins.

Numerous other trend stories have been manually suppressed by HN's operators this year. The argument that a story is probably valid because HN's "anti-spam algos" didn't catch it probably doesn't hold water.

Well that just means their vote ring detection system needs improving. If there really is 100 people that have a vested interest in Bitcoin all collaborating on IRC or whatever and they are the majority of the ones pumping up the story then this seems trivial to catch.

Yes, it needs improving by attaching a strong negative weight to any story about bitcoin, perhaps until the next HN reboot.

Because tptacek says so? No.

Look at the distributions of the types of people that vote up the story, look at the differences in the average number of upvotes once it hits the front page, look at how many people flag it, but if you need to hard code things that legit users upvote you are basically imposing your view of what is good content over thousands of other people. This isn't a Viagra ad, this is a cryptography based, near-zero transaction fee, distributed, open source, online currency.

No wonder it always hits the front page, any of those five categories could hit the front page.

What is the difference on the internet between 100 "people" and 100 "user accounts"?

(I'm a data guy)

You just throw simple stats at the problem. You look at what a typical distribution of a normal submission looks like (30% of users < 60 days old, 20% of users < 100 karma, etc) and then you negatively weight submissions which breach the pattern by a certain sigma.

You only see bitcoin stories that float to HN, not stories about bitcoin that got submitted and got only a few votes, at most.

My bitcoin stories sometime got voted up to get to the front page for a brief time but they often drop out the front page fairly quick.

Quite possible, but there's been a number of negative articles on Bitcoin as well, including this one.