A lot of people think that! I don't know why, maybe it's something the guidelines need to be a bit clearer about.

It's never been about only tech. Here's dang from 2 years ago saying it's not only about tech: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7663631

Here's the guidelines from 2008: https://web.archive.org/web/20080616133301/http://ycombinato...

> 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.

If you really want to kludge it into "on topic for startups" it talks about building a brand and competing against incumbents.