[connor]

Excellent critique. I feel that HN often blows by rational ignorance with some of it's advice (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_ignorance). Sometimes it's best to do it wrong and actually do something, rather than hopping around per someone else's dogma and never actually making anything.

But I think it's also possible that the HN frontpage simply doesn't give a good impression of the average hacker. The average hacker is not welding together the latest js frameworks while tying it all together with node.js and hadoop. Perhaps more articles on "common man" hackers could be beneficial, or at least give some perspective.

[hobonumber1]

Completely agree with this. HN is great for technical discussions, but at the end of the day, arguing over technical details doesn't solve any real problem for 99% of the users out there.