When you say "shills and astroturfers" are you referring to paid advertisers? To be sure, there's a lot of paid advertisers trying to shill products on HN, but

When you say "shills and astroturfers" are you referring to paid advertisers? To be sure, there's a lot of paid advertisers trying to shill products on HN, but I really doubt that Apple has to pay people to defend them. I think people just naturally tend to promote things that align with their values and rip things that don't. Most technology has no real core values, so they don't inspire much passion either for or against. Only certain things really inspire a lot of passion. Apple is one of course with their design emphasis and they inspire a lot of passion both for and against. Crypto is another. 37signals/basecamp was one of those I guess. Rails was definitely another. All of these things had some outlier values that inspired passionate arguments. Emacs and VIM. Etc. You can definitely see an anti-fanboy effect with Crypto. If you're a marketer and want to farm upvotes on HN to build up fake accounts, just go in a random crypto thread and type some vapid criticism like "Sure it's great if you love money laundering" even if the criticism is out of context and you'll instantly build up your account.