Just because HN is where some journalists found a link doesn't make it a news source it just shows that everyone reading HN could replace them.

I think this is a compliment from the journalism community. Any journalist on a particular beat is going to lurk on various news aggregators and forums, looking for a scoop. This writer has probably seen dozens, hundreds of stories come across HN's headlines that were reporting on blogs already given exposure and news stories that had already broken. If the journalist determined that in this case, HN had the scoop, and dang's outlet was the first to publish the link to the hacktivist's blog, then HN rightly deserves credit as having the scoop. I have no idea whether it went down that way; I'm just describing a Platonic ideal.