> It's hard not to believe that a voting ring is involved somehow.

Take that back. It's not true: I have no voting ring for my posts.

And here's some data to back that up. According to the HN Search API I have submitted 373 items that are posts on jgc.org (out of a total of 670). Of those the following karma has been gained:

  Points Number of posts

  1	 81
  <5	 102
  <10	 32
  <50	 74
  <100	 47
  <200	 6
  <500	 31

So, 215 posts out of 373 had less than 10 karma. Only 37 posts out of 373 had > 100. So, as you say, some of my posts (about 10%) are greatly appreciated here, but most are not. No voting ring needed.

All those posts account for 12,624 points of karma (from my total of 18,119 points obtained from submissions, not comments). So 56% of my submissions were for my blog and resulted in 70% of my submission karma.

Articles don't just gain points by direct upvotes. They also gain a point when someone else submits it.

I suspect that there is significant overlap between his regular readers and HN participants. People read his blog and submit it.

Furthermore, articles about writing and karma acquisition are often topics of interest to HN's readership, as are articles about HN.

There's no conspiracy needed to explain it. Not to mention that his karma score from comments alone would put the author on the leader board.

I disagree with the voting ring comment. That's pretty harsh.

Just for fun, here are the posts jgc makes by domain:

http://imgur.com/BKCaW

And here are the posts of the blog.jgc.org domain by poster:

http://imgur.com/xqpEF

I think you just said his average article is average, and his best articles are great.

If I had any articles that are great, I'd be very happy indeed. I might even submit everything I wrote, just to let the community decide which are great.

One mans voting ring is another man's circle of friends.