I suspect this is exactly correct. First, it plays to a lot of colleges who are having career fairs this month as their seniors consider what to do after graduation. Second it plays to what has been the biggest job selector for new graduates over the last 5 years, "Will I be able to make an impact?". The number one way to discourage people from going to BigCo is to point out that they are going to spend 3 - 5 years just getting enough of a political network developed in order to be given a chance at an assignment that might move the needle slightly.

Last year I was walking around a recruiting event at CU and just listening to the pitches being made by companies Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and LinkedIn (and in full disclosure was making the same sort of pitches for IBM with "Hey its the Watson group, its the most important company project and we're building one of the most important projects in it!" all to counter the fact that it was hundreds of thousands of employees, most of which were not having much impact at all.

You need stories where you can pitch them "if you're brilliant enough and work hard enough you can be the person who changes the world." otherwise the siren song of startups of "You will probably eat lunch with the CEO at least once a month, and everything you do will be really impactful." will carry the day.

Actually it is odd timing considering intern recruiting is slowing way down for most companies around now.

Yup. Voting on HN is very suspect in general and easy to manipulate because the votes are hidden.