Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok?
sophacles: I've done some experiments, it seems to me that the first vote is critical, and that it should occur w/in 10 - 20 minutes of posting a story.  Otherwise the story just won't get noticed.  I've seen this with submissions many time, and in fact have intentionally voted up a "worse" version of a story to test this. Turns out the upvoted version gains the momentum most of the time, even when the other story is better written or has more detail, or whatever.Now whether or not it is ethical is different, but it seems to me that this general behaviour of how stories go would suggest a single "friend vote" at the right time carries more weight than having friends cheat anyway. So the question becomes: if I post something to HN, then link a friend to my HN posting, instead of a direct link, is it ethical since I know he will probably vote up the HN post.Edit: another question that arrises... many of my freinds and I link each other constantly in private communications, does moving part of this to HN constitute an ethical dilemma since there is now voting and a larger audience invovled? Part of me says no, as those articles are interesting to us anyway, hence the linking, and the upvote is just a formalization of that...