> If HN is brainwashing us to redefine "hacker" to suit their needs, what is their end game?

Promoting the startups YCombinator has funded over the years? Promoting YCombinator itself for prospective entrepreneurs looking to get funding? Those are the most obvious ones.

> Lastly, the vast majority of readers will never submit an application to YC so that link is also mostly irrelevant.

In a "vast" majority of even a thousand people, that's still up to a few dozen or so in the minority. And YC would have plenty of motive to encourage that minority to grow, and especially for said growth to have YC in their list of seed funders to apply to because "well they host Hacker News and I'm a Hacker News regular".

Everyone has ulterior motives. Just because YCombinator doesn't explicitly state "Welcome to Hacker News, where we basically cozy up to you in the hopes that you'll apply for seed funding and consultation from us so we can make money off the success of your business" doesn't mean that such an ulterior motive doesn't exist.

I'm probably being excessively critical, of course, and maybe YCombinator really is totally benevolent and running Hacker News out of the goodness of its venture-capitalist heart. It's hard to really know, however, and for that reason I tend to err on the side of caution.

> Your interpretation of the article is incorrect. [...]

How does any of that paragraph invalidate my remark? Just because someone has "counter-culture tendencies, rebellious attitudes, and subversive agendas" doesn't mean that they're suddenly "hackers". You need creative ingenuity and a desire to understand how things work, and those traits don't come automatically with the ones you mention.

> To me, that article is a Rails article, and the secondary trivia is that the company happens to be ThriveSmart.

You're probably right that I'm characterizing that one a bit harshly. To me, though, it reeks a bit of the whole "look at us, we're hip and modern and use Rails so you should totally buy our hip/modern/Railsy product". Especially considering that the product in question happens to be a web development product.

Not that there's something particularly wrong about this - as a buyer of services, the technological implementations do often matter to me, since it gives me a vague idea of whether or not the service I'm buying will be sufficiently-reliable for my needs. It's just that, having been on the other side of that (first-hand experience with companies that want to show off their tech as an advertising tool for prospective customers, talent, etc.), it strikes me as an advertising-first, tech-second article, and I tend to believe it important to recognize such things. Being aware that you're being advertised to is an important part of making wise market decisions; an unawareness of the influence of some subtle bit of advertising can mean the difference between a reasoned evaluation of a product and a gung-ho "this product looks good" based on hard-to-self-identify confirmation biases.

> To proof to me is what types of articles show up on the front page.

As it is to me; on some days the technical outweighs the business, and on other days the business outweighs the technical. As you said, though, one tends to see whatever one wants to see. Perhaps you're looking at HN through rose-colored glasses. Perhaps I'm looking at HN through dirt-colored glasses. It's all a matter of perspective.