Your hardware matters quite a bit if you're doing lower level things and the architecture is not the same as you're developing for. But apparently HN is all web devs
Unless you want to insmod things in your main kernel like a cowboy, I don't see why you'd need architectures to match. Cross compilation is the proper way (for some architectures it would be quite hard to find a machine capable of compiling the kernel before the heat death of the universe...)