IMO this article is fine; it's clearly a problem that interests a lot of us. I'd much prefer this than another bunk article about apple or techcrunch rubbish :-)
what usually happens is a more technical discussion appears here in the comments
hacker news != exclusively technology news
Also; adopting a combative tone in comments is usually frowned on even more than off topic submissions. Just sayin.
Your sounding very angry about it... Perhaps hn just isn't a good fit for you.
Anyway; I think were going to see such posts as these. In all honesty I much prefer these to 20 rehashing the same piece of apple or facebook news :p (which is happening quite a lot at the moment).
Don't expect people (particularly here) to pay much attention if you sound like a jerk :(. And that is all I have to say on the matter.
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Constant engineering failures and desperate measures to avoid the imminent unnatural ecological destruction of the Gulf of Mexico is something that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity, in my opinion. The point is not the (un)natural disaster (which is while quite sad, it is certainly off-topic here in itself), it's the engineering problem.
