First, anyone who says that Python or Ruby is not even comparable to Perl is full of it or very mistaken. They are close enough that we quickly run into the narcissism of small differences [1].
Second, in my experience HN ranges from uninterested to hostile when it comes to Perl. I read lots about Perl, but many of the blogs or forums I frequent are Perl-centric. My point is simply that you shouldn't judge by "what you read" if what you read is a function of what you choose or who you follow.
Third, and most importantly, the Perl5 community doesn't seem anywhere near dead. Off the top of my head, I'm particularly happy with a slew of new tools for working with Perl and CPAN: cpanm[2], perlbrew[3], cpan-outdated[4], pmuninstall[5], cpansearch [6] (written in C, but obviously made for the Perl community). There's also Plack[7] for modern Perl webapps. Finally, consider the whole Modern Perl[8] movement.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differences
[2] http://github.com/miyagawa/cpanminus
[3] http://github.com/gugod/App-perlbrew
[4] http://github.com/tokuhirom/cpan-outdated
[5] http://github.com/xaicron/pm-uninstall