https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4081390
There are many points and counter-points there, with more anecdotes, and some data.
Comments there are closed, of course, it being so old, so any new discussion will have to be here.
A simple check of the account would suggest that they needed a bit of karma, their submission of the Hudsonreed site was DOA (as most, 'create an account, submit a site' type submissions are). They haven't made any comments to get karma that way, so they use the 'other' well known karma farming technique, scrape HN for past stories that were popular and re-submit them at the 'right' time. It has become enough of a signal that I suspect pg could add it into his heuristics for spammers.
/r/KarmaConspiracy
It is a pretty popular web site with a part of the technical crowd. It gets analyzed a lot [1][2]. It also gets a lot of 'spam' (since coverage on the front page of HN can send you lots of traffic [3][4][5]) HN "scores" its participants using a counter 'karma' [6] which also affects features visible to your account (well at least the down vote button) And with any 'score' there are people who score more than others [7]. And where there is scoring there is competition.
The bottom line is that certain behaviors emerge for people who actively try to achieve a 'high score' (more karma) and people who are trying to achieve 'viriality'[8] (more exposure).
It was unkind of me to point out the behavior (usually I just note it and ignore it) and for that I apologize.
Colin (grandparent posting) has a 'thing' about stuff that gets doubly or triply or more posted. I understand the annoyance, it can get annoying. But I've also noted that he posts a lot of links :-) A number of people tend to complain when their version of the link doesn't make it to the front page when someone else's done (it's a 'I'm not getting that karma whine') And generally harmless (other than it sometimes back fires and they get down voted for whining)
[1] http://blog.rjmetrics.com/surprising-hacker-news-data-analys...
[2] http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/overall
[3] http://thestartupfoundry.com/2011/05/26/hacker-news-and-driv...
[4] http://sparknlaunch.wordpress.com/2012/07/04/lessons-learned...
[5] http://pitchpigeon.com/blog/10-lessons-learned-from-a-succes...
[6] http://pitchpigeon.com/blog/10-lessons-learned-from-a-succes...
[7] https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
[8] Not exactly a word, but my definition would be the rate at which things spread, especially on the Internet.
http://www.jacquesmattheij.com/The+Unofficial+HN+FAQ
Bits of it are a little out-of-date, and there are some things it hasn't caught up with, but it's mostly right, and some people find it useful.