At first I though they must be running in Incognito/Private mode, but I tested Chrome/Firefox/Safari and they all still send the referer in the request header even in Incognito/Private mode, which seems odd to me as that would be an easy thing to hide.
So what would cause this? Ad blockers? Corporate firewalls and proxies? Or are ⅔ of you copying and pasting the links on HN instead of just clicking?
Ad blocker
hosts
firewall