There's a forum for this kind of thing, and it's called Reddit. As a matter of fact, that's exactly where this article was cross-posted from.
I just personally find it galling that this kind of post is tolerated here. It has nothing to do with hacking or entrepreneurship and it only really serves to broaden the exposure of Hacker News to people who really have no business here in the first place. It wasn't so long ago that when there was an influx of outside exposure PG would proclaim "Erlang day" and encourage everyone to fill the front page with arcane technical articles about Erlang. It really did feel good to be a part of a site like that, and it also served as a sort of "reset" button that reminded everyone what this site was really supposed to be about.
That said, as others have pointed out here, "intellectual curiosity" is part of the guidelines -- and as long as it continues to be, we'll continue to see articles like this and people will continue to defend them. I gave up on railing against it myself a while ago and I just ignore those submissions for the most part. Fortunately HN continues to be a great source of information and discussion, even if it's perhaps not as spectacular as it could be.