IMO it is just an excuse because people are asking why hack them and sending a lot of hate instead of praise.

What a pathetic excuse. Dropbox is loved and used by many people who depend on it. Their behaviour is disgusting nothing more than that.

Honestly, I'm not sure, and I definitely don't think it's some Aaron would have done.

It's a ridiculous claim.... they want more publicity. Dropbox has done nothing to warrant this attack for 'activism'. Let's hope they don't leak sensitive information if Dropbox reaches out to them and fixes the issue - that would especially be something Aaron wouldn't do.

For what it's worth, I write most things in Markdown and I use reference style links[0] by default. So, I tend to do that in comments on Hacker News, but I omit the brackets which would go around the link "value," (i.e. the inner value of the a tag in HTML). Plus, by listing the links under the comment, I find that it's neater and easier to read. And by simply including the links (even if it's just for "a twitter link" in my "10 word comment") it saves other people time because they don't need to search for it themselves.

[0]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#link