The purpose of this seems to be to treat Wikipedia as a trusted, reliable source of truth about the canonical URL for websites (debatable, of course). The idea is that you don't trust the search engines, perhaps because you live in a country where your government has required search engines to censor results in some way, but (for some reason?) lets you go to Wikipedia.
https://lmddgtfy.net/?q=%5Chacker%20news
That's especially useful if DDG is default search engine in your browser.
(I'm not affiliated with DDG)