Not so much 'news' but perhaps a quick hack, nice reminder, a quick intro for the less experienced (who may not know what they are missing in the first place). Or perhaps someone who has set this up before in a different way might want to change how they do it.
So whilst this is probably not front news worthy of LEET HACKERS it's probably made someone go 'hey thats cool' and that's all it needed to do.
doesn't imply being "LEET".
Back to the topic: I my own router to create a tunnel similar to the one described by the OP. It is not as fast as an Amazon instance but free wi-fi is neither.
Anyway, as much as I complain about all the puff pieces, there are still plenty of articles with real technical meat on HN, you just got to wade through some crap to get to them.
That's the hacker ethos - show what you know, if you are wrong someone will point it out and others (and hopefully youtself!) will learn from it.
The sort of attitude you are display is the sort of hypercritical one that prevents people from submitting "Show HN", which is a real pity.
Maybe they don't want the hassle of configuring the browser (or other sw)