Sort of but not really.
Even though this mantra is repeated often, the greatest "cogs" actually have deep domain knowledge. That's how most mainstream programmers "level up". They become experts in the application they're developing and what it does functionally. Or in the domain in which the application operates (after having worked on several applications in the same field, for various companies).
HackerNews folks don't work in this kind of field, but in that domain Lisp is a liability. You want a plain and simple programming language, no meta programming, dumb albeit repeated code that does just what it needs to do. The rest of the brain cycles are needed to understand the often convoluted business logic ("due to this regulation the employee needs to be X", "the account is Y because our partner Zs", etc.).