Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok?
pg: There's a fuzzy line.  I think it's ok (or at least undetectable) if the voters are genuine HN users.  There are limits to what they'll upvote, unless they genuinely like it.  Whereas it's not ok to email a bunch of people and tell them to create HN accounts for the purpose of upvoting your post; that's basically sockpuppets by proxy.  The threshold is somewhere between these two cases.There is a lot of code for detecting voting rings, and it itself embodies varying levels of punishment (ranging from votes not affecting the position on the page, to votes not affecting the score, to the post getting flagged to be killed) depending on how abusive a vote seems.  So far things seem to be under control, probably because the way I decide when to add more countermeasures is when I notice lame posts doing suspiciously well on the frontpage.