Question: How was this list generated, ie: how do you find out which hash number has a lot of bitcoins in it? I thought that was completely hidden.
You can see these addresses and speculate. Also some members of the community keep track of famous Bitcoin users that are known to have accumulated over 100,000 coins.
a 2012 paper by Ron and Shamir. (Adi Shamir of “RSA".)
Preprint available here: http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/584.pdf
(The "Rich List” seems obviously inspired by this paper.)
Sadly that paper is pretty poor. It's adequate for informing someone bitcoin isn't anonymous though— but the bitcoin.org website also does that without being littered with basic misunderstandings of how Bitcoin works.