I'm talking about the top level comments, that is to say, comments posted directly in reply to the post itself. At the time, of the six comments, 1 was the author, and two were his colleagues who created accounts <5 mins before the post was created.

Isn't it strange that 3 accounts were created moments before the post and then all happened to make their first and only comments on this post, each with strongly positive responses and not disclosing any link to the project?

A further account has been created since then:

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=chucklarrieu

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=botcanics

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bcalderwood

I do understand that HN has voter ring detection which seeks to cluster groups of users who engage strongly in cooperative voting, but the accounts here are probably too new to establish a pattern strong enough to call a voting ring already.