No particular reason. I was watching the Snowden film for the first time, and at the same time fixing some bugs in secure document viewer code that required me to test it on large zip files (ideally containing PDFs). I just happened across this repo from a DDG search.
I would recommend Citizenfour if you haven't seen it. It's a documentary where you essentially see Snowden leak the documents from his Hong Kong hotel room. It's amazing the footage exists.
My theory is that trolls/bots work together to get this content to the front page and keep it there. If you pay attention you'll notice Snowden, CIA, FBI, NSA, or adjacent topics on the front page daily with a corresponding political flame war.
It's easy to be tempted by such theories—they're almost mesmeric—but the data doesn't support them. For example in this case the early upvoters (I just checked) are mostly accounts around 10 years old, which have posted and upvoted as ordinary HN users since forever. Of course that doesn't prove they aren't trolls/bots, but it's a strong counterindicator, unless you believe they've been building up a track record of posting about functional programming languages or whatever for nefarious purposes.
The upvote data isn't public, of course, but you can do much the same analysis by looking at the posting history of submitters and commenters. That is public, and what I can tell you is that on topics like this, the private data and the public data nearly always point in much the same direction.
(That's not true in every context—for example, voting rings are a thing in terms of people wanting to promote their startups and whatnot, and we've put a ton of work into combating that over the years. But none of that analysis yields anything significant when it comes to a topic like the OP.)
I love this reply and all the perspective it provides on what can be gleaned and what is the baseline state of affairs.
But I'm a little sad that I had to know the extra special secret click spot (on the link showing the age of the flagged item, which item was folded away and fully hidden other than the grayed metadata/title) to even see it (it==your reply) at all. Well I'm not sad for me, because I did know how to click there, expand the post, and read your reply, but it's a pity that your reply won't be seen by more people.
I do understand however that maybe you've chosen the right tradeoff here of giving the targeted info to the poster who probably was sincere and can benefit, versus showing it more widely which would be a frequent enough occurrence that it might become a distracting portion of the site content. So, I defer to your judgement; just sharing thoughts here. Thanks for what you do.
I love a good HN conspiracy theory. The best was when someone accused me of being the agent of a foreign adversary intent on sowing discord for using the word "boomer".
HN is clearly the vitally exposed artery of all Western media!
