Nothing special, just was interesting to see. I wonder who the clientele is...
The real hack is knowing the audience hn is comprised of, and creating great content for that audience. There's several great startups doing just that and very finely so too in HN
This has been marketing 101 for at least a decade. Reddit, hacker news, any site with user content is bought and paid for.
I lost 10 year old account by offhandedly mentioning it existed in a thread like this criticising the behaviour.
It's weird they don't want to talk about it but I do understand not linking it. There's mod accounts to some very big national subs up for sale.