As mentioned below, YC founders have orange usernames. But that doesn't give them immunity from flagging when they submit bad articles. :)
If you are a very well known user like patio, it's possible that you'll get a good amount of upvotes more easily. For most users, however, it seems to me to be a matter of good title, good content and luck as to whether or not your submission does well.
Patio's comments, in my experience, are an outlier in quality/length, so it's hard to use that as a trend.
Anyway, to me it seems that, with the rare exception, HN is pretty good in each submission being judged on its own.