I love HN but you are right, and I feel like I can never mention the language I use at my job the most because I'd get the same unsolicited replies about how every other users' preferred language is better than mine.
I wish that culture would just die already and we could have more honest discussions about actual use-cases where one particular language might be a better choice.
PHP is the one language where everyone feels comfortable suggesting changing to some other language. I should have followed HN's advice and become a novice Ruby on Rails developer 10 years ago, and then a novice Golang developer, and now I could be a novice NodeJS developer! If only...
There's nothing wrong with asking around to see if anybody's looking for a strong [language] dev. I just wish it were possible to see the word "php" in an HN thread without it being followed by some subset of the same tedious replies.