You know, I actually feel the contrary: Hacker News has gone the way of more hacker than startups. shrug
I'd rather hear something about solving waste management in Naples or interesting software ideas for the upcoming smart grid than about accessing some social network on the iPhone. To be honest, I just don't need any technological solution to keep in touch with the few friends I have. And I'm utterly bored by CSS 3-liners and MySQL sharding.
In general, I wish there was more cross-pollination between people with technology competence and people with domain knowledge. This may not be the worst time in history to find people with valuable domain knowledge who are looking for new opportunities and would like to join forces with hackers.
I realise that this is difficult and it's obviously not HN's fault that it's so rare. Maybe ycombinator could do more to break out of the pure web dev space.
I still visit HN a lot but get something different from it: closer to early reddit.
I signed up here looking for what the original post posits providing; what I found were articles about startups, business, marketing, the current/next great gold rush, followed by the token (recently it has been improving) programmer/hacker article. And the articles about startups, business, and marketing were not great on any scale; in fact upon critical review, said articles advocated rather bad strategies. Strategies which amounted to little more than legalized scams, strategies which optimize for the short term, strategies promoting win at any cost, strategies which advocate me first and to hell with the consequences; in short, strategies of which Phineas Taylor Barnum would have been proud.
Before joining the Hacker News community, I was interested in starting my own business. Now that I see what is advocated as "startup culture", I want nothing to do with starting a business in the United States (because my conclusion is the culture and laws of the U.S. have optimized for short term gain, with the resulting push towards the strategies mentioned earlier). What happened to a business (either startup or established business) having integrity in all of their relationships, being a responsible citizen of the business ecosystem it operates within, and providing a legacy beyond the generation within which it was founded?
In conclusion, I would be VERY interested in being involved with the community type proposed by jcapote (in any capacity: contributing member, developer, beta tester, et cetera).