grellas' comment has 270+ replies, and HN's software currently paginates threads at 250 comments. That is purely for performance reasons, and I can't wait to be able to turn it off. If you go to the subsequent pages, there are many other top-level comments:
grellas' comment is at the top because the ranking algorithm put it there; many of his comments have gotten upvoted heavily over the years. Moderators didn't do any of that.
People here don't like to hear things that smell like politics, but the Condi Rice thing is a big deal. Excuse my bluntness, but she was one of the public faces of thousands of preventable deaths in Iraq. To have no problem with this I think has so something to do with what people mean when they say many in tech have basic ethics problems.
[1] http://www.drop-dropbox.com/
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)