It's slightly tricky because people usually upvote what they are interested in. Therefore if a big bunch of people are interested in Win10, then it is just completely normal if they upvote these topics. Similarly, basically every new Apple hardware ends up on the top of HN. Same applies to many other things -- secure messaging, depression/burnout related articles, all Tesla news, etc.
It's very hard to run a news site and keep stuff out that actually interest people.
I very much doubt that these articles are upvoted by employees, etc.
The web developer community is well known to have a massive Apple bias. I'm not surprised by Apple stuff going to the top quickly, usually.
But this post in particular is suspect because it is totally devoid of content. Look at the comments so far, the most discussion has been prompted by the lack of content resulting in wondering how on earth this got to the top so quickly.
I'd bet dollars to donuts there was coordinated voting by Microsoft employees. Lots of companies do it on reddit, it's much less common here at HN (I think), but it still does happen.
What makes you say this is the only community on HN? I personally wouldn't say there's one specific community HN caters to beyond "technology people". There's all sorts of topics posted daily on here, and only a select few cater to web devs. Honestly, if it's something done by one of the big companies (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc), it'll most likely get on HN because there is no one particular focus.
Won't happen - there's little doubt that each person adding an upvote would be a real person. In order to police something like that you'd be effectively policing people's reasons for upvoting which is impossible.
They should be able to see that a bunch of immediate up votes to this submission were from Redmond, WA IP blocks. There's no need to guess as to motivation then.
They can also look for people going straight to a story and upvoting there, upvotes clustered around MS domains, and other things. All of which are currently in the voting ring detection code.
HN has pretty advanced code to handle cases like what MS is being accused of right now, and none of it's been triggered (or this story would've gone up the front page then fallen back down).
Linking to an HN post internally and saying "please upvote this" is wrong; multiple people independently deciding they want to post or upvote the article, even multiple people from the same company, seems completely fine.
It's very hard to run a news site and keep stuff out that actually interest people.
I very much doubt that these articles are upvoted by employees, etc.