Why the snark? There is much talk on HN and elsewhere about how new ideas are generated, how companies try to be "innovative," etc. This is just his take on one way he comes up with new ideas. I don't have the same fascination with screws, but he obviously didn't mean it to be literal for everyone to do the exact same thing. It certainly made me think about both the physical things and processes all around me that I constantly take for granted. Questioning these things is how we are always evolving and improving. I'd say reminding people of this is valuable.
I'm with GP on this one. Most HN articles these days are fluff. These aren't bad bloggythings for the most part, but I'd just as soon see these things show up on a more general aggregator. (This is, in part, my failure to recognize the HN audience itself changing over the last year and a half).
Fluff isn't necessarily bad, in that it's a discussion point, but it is very bad for this format of site.