Unless I miss something, having this type of local news on the Hacker News homepage is surprising.

IMHO, it falls under the category of "boat programming" (https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/14486/174092). That is, it is only thanks to the "Bay Area woman" that it grabbed some attention of the Bay Area-affiliated crowd (if it was a "Budapest woman", it would be treated, factfully, as local news).

In particular, it falls short of the HN guidelines of "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".