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Asking your Hack Reactor friends to comment/upvote has the same effect.
If your friends are regular users, they would have understand the explicit and implicit guidelines of the site, and upvote stories because they are interesting. (Another unexpected behavior is to write empty one-line comments. It looks like astroturfing and are generally downvoted.)
Everyone thinks that their submission is good. That's why a fair voting system is necessary to let the community decide what is genuinely good.