My first impression on reading this article is that the sites he names (techcrunch, careerrookie, etc.) have hundreds of thousands of indexed pages of actual content. They may be being practicing black hat seo (or just wasting marketing dollars), but their content is actually relevant, and their referral traffic from these links probably outweighs any SEO penalties they are receiving for these practices.

It should be pretty obvious that you can't spend a weekend creating an SEO link farm and expect to get to the front page of Google... Try bankrolling a professional editorial staff for a year and generate actual content in whatever niche you want and then run your anchor text experiment. Post a link to HN with those results!