What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
At least for me, logistics gratifies my intellectual curiosity.
I think if you try posit a canonical definition of the word 'Hacking' here, you're going to have a bad time. The community decides the relevance by voting.
> The status quo is established by the actions of large-scale corporate and political actors
Then isn't it important for people to learn about the status quo? Especially given it's moving so fast. Without this article I would have probably considered a startup doing the same to be cutting-edge, disruptive and most definitely 'hacking'. Now we all know where the bar is set.
It's important for hackers to be aware of the actions of corporations and governments because they will have effects on us and we can exert some influence on them in return, but I don't see how this logic applies here.
"[Going] from idea to production" is such a vague concept that I find it hard to pick a sphere of human activity to which it can't be applied. It certainly doesn't explain why this article is appropriate for discussion in a niche which actively brands itself as catering to hackers.