[gnosis]

Because they're not very useful if nobody knows what they are or what they do.

I suppose they're kind of cute, in an easter-egg sort of sense. But I really don't see why HN just couldn't have a regular landing page or maybe a sidebar with these links on them, along with maybe a caption or tooltip describing what they're for.

Why all the mystery? It really makes the site much less useful for huge numbers of people to keep this stuff semi-hidden.