And I've gotten so much value out of HN discussions that benefit the site linkee (lots of awesome threads start out "Show HN: My new site/business").
I guess my main point is: I'm all for the business linked to getting PR, as long as we, the HN members get some cool value out of it. In this case, i thought the post was very topical because talent/skill shortage is a frequently talked about issue here, as are work cultural norms in general.
But I totally respect the opinion that some posts may not have an interesting enough ideas to make PR interesting. That said, I always wait for the other shoe to drop: the HN thread it spawns often ends up being incredible.
That would apply to about a third of the posts that make it to the HN front page nowadays, I'd say ;-)
"Today I had an epiphany. Maybe the right thing to do is to enroll prospective job applicants in some kind of low-impact training as part of the interview process. If the training were given in a part-time, online format (like we do at CodeLesson)..."