This could be ok if he was doing an experiment about HN. These tricks of asking your buddies to upvote and retweet seems against the spirit of HN.
I would be interested to see what the other HNers think.
It's OK while it is sensible (after all, you will inform your friends you have published a new blog post or whatever) and not some heavy "please upvote" campaign.
I completely agree with that. But it seems that his "supporters" were invited at waves to give his post a boost.
This, obviously, is out of bounds.
My read was that it's just a conversation about a previous post that made it to the homepage, and not an attempt to game the system.