This is a reference to a classic hack, Mark V. Shaney, where a Markov-chain generator was used to post to Usenet. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V_Shaney)

Bonus tie-ins to HN topics:

Rob Pike was one of the perpetrators (an author of the Go language)

It was featured in Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games column in Scientific American

(yeah, I wrote one too, after reading the article. I think it's catnip to hackers, like the Game of Life)