Does anyone have any experience botting/ranking on HackerNews successfully? They run a pretty tight ship over there, but would love to hear if there’s been any success in hacking the HN algo? 
There’s no grounded basis for saying botting reliably ranks posts on Hacker News just because a few posts appeared to succeed. Ranking is not a raw vote counter: timing matters, and anti-abuse signals can make coordinated votes a poor predictor of where a post lands. The exact weighting is not public, so a temporary high position does not establish that botting caused it. The distinction is between observing a result and showing a repeatable mechanism; an apparent success is not enough to claim the algorithm has been hacked.