Your comment broke the site guidelines, which ask you not to post insinuations of astroturfing, shilling, etc., without evidence. Multiple articles showing up about a topic isn't evidence of abuse; it's perfectly normal. Any slightly unusual angle like the hard-drive thing is more than enough to explain a small flurry of articles.

"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email [email protected] and we'll look at the data."

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We have that rule because it's extremely easy to fall into imagining this sort of thing based purely on a few data points one dislikes. In the absence of evidence, that's likely what's happening. Moreover, the submission histories of most of the accounts that posted those threads is evidence against what you said, and that information is public and trivial to check.