Agreed. Which leads to two questions: 1) Why is this post so far down the page? and 2) If anyone is qualified to combat automated (or perhaps even human) astroturfing by technical means, it's YC. Dang/other mods, are there efforts underway to detect and mitigate this?

I ask both on principle and because the quality of discussion is noticeably damaged by having to wade through many questionably real comments before finding actual discussion.

And of course it's not just the Americans doing this, undoubtedly the Russians/Chinese etc do something similar.