Everything about tarsnap is absurd. It's basically the world's most absurd backup service (insanely expensive, poor UX, bus factor of ~1, restoring moderate amounts of data appears to take days (!)[1]), brought about by an absurdly bad allocation of human capital (it's run by a double Putnam challenge winner, with several other impressive accomplishments), and as such, absurdly beloved by HN.

[1] In case of an emergency, you will always be able to get back your data from tarsnap at a blazing rate of 50kB/s https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap/issues/333.