Hi guys! Original creator here. I had no idea this was trending here until some people on LinkedIn wrote to me!!! I will try to make the garbage files hunt easter egg. This was an idea that started all of this but I couldn't get it to work nicely and I definitely didn't expect this much traction!
You seem to have folks leveraging XSS against the leaderboard (classic!). Of course, the JSON is available via https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/api/leaderboard?limit=1000&o...). XSS in the top entry (purportedly completed in -1e+129ms) might be firing since I get redirected to the Hacker's Manifesto included in Phrack (issue #7, released 1986-09-25) ;-)