A story about a very large and popular technology company's response to allegations of them intentionally adding backdoors to one of their flagship products isn't appropriate for a technology news site?

Edit: HN's on-top guidelines "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

Seriously, I would like to understand why you think this isn't HN appropriate.

I think you are missing the sarcasm; he's pointing out that HN votes up sensationalism and not the follow up stories.

This is on the front page of HN.

When I made the comment it wasn't, and I had the only comment. It took about an 45 minutes to gain any traction, which can be verified by the age of the comments.

The original story would have been on the front page in minutes, with dozens of comments.

If the difference between a sensationalist vs. reaction article is only 45 minutes I think HN is doing fairly well compared to other online communities.

A story is almost gone in 45 minutes on HN. You'll often notice people complaining about posting a story posted a day earlier that didn't get any traction and is highly voted on resubmission. Someone has to start a conversion or it has to get up voted quickly. I was the 4th upvote and the first comment.

astroturfing at it's finest

It's a win for everyone when a seminal tech company responds to Snowden material with a serious response. It compels the public to take the outlet seriously (Der Spiegel), the material seriously (Snowden), and it contributes to the general tightening in the security field.

In a word ... validation.