[robin_reala]

I was intrigued by that as well, so I did some digging and turned up the transcript of the “Microsoft Fiscal Year 2019 First Quarter Earnings Conference Call”: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/events/FY-2019/earn... . If you search through that for “Hacker News” you’ll find Satya saying:

In fact this morning I was reading a news article in Hacker News, which is a community where we have been working hard to make sure that Azure is growing in popularity and I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have made a lot of progress. In some sense that at least basically said that we’re neck to neck with Amazon when it comes to even elite developers as represented in that community.

[Klonoar]

Hmm... I don't take from this that they're "gaming" HN, moreso that they understand that the product has to be well-regarded here.

The comment that started this chain has a tone that implies otherwise, which is why I asked. Seems like a nothing-burger to me.

Edit: "ton" -> "tone"