Yes, many businesspeople hire bad hackers resulting in a bad product. But equally many hackers hire bad bussinesspeople and never get their product out the door. None of these scenarios are good.
The keypoint here is that to start a successful business you need many components, and if you fail at just one of them you're finished - A startup is never stronger than its weakest link.
The startups that achieve success acknowledge what their strengths are, are keenly aware of their weaknesses and try diligently to hire people that can fill these out. So the great hacker should not frown at businesspeople if he wants to do a succesful startup, he should acknowledge the fact that he has shortcomings, as everybody does, and try to hire people to fill out these shortcomings. The weakest point with many hackers (in my personal experience) is that they don't like political games, don't like cold-calling people, and don't think marketing should drive your sales. Exactly the things a good businessperson excels at.
So please, get along and you will make more succesful companies.
That said, there are no pointers or how-tos that will turn you into a qualified judge of a profession completely unrelated to your own and I don't at all think it's arrogant for "hackers" (or anyone else) to be somewhat offended at that idea.
Your statement reads as if to say "how arrogant of you to think a businessperson can't become a qualified judge of your work by reading a few pointers", which is itself a very arrogant statement. I don't think that's necessarily what you meant, but I think you are mistaking a little bit of offense and some defensiveness for arrogance and reacting to that misperception.
This isn't "hackers > " anyone, either, I certainly don't think I could read a few pointers and suddenly have the ability to pick a well qualified architect, urban planner or a mechanic (I know zero about cars). I could see a house and say "hey, you must be a good architect" but if I had to hire one early in their career I'd ideally go to someone in their field that I trust (as suggested in many comments here).
BTW I say this as a business guy. Granted I know how to code a little. But I still need someone to code the site up, And don't bother finding a cofounder at that stage, for that early alpha, you need to rely on freelancers to get the job done, because finding a tech cofounder is next to impossible.
Why? Because every programmer gets approached once a week with "hey, I heard you know interwebz, help me code up my site and lets make billions!".
Not true. The vast majority of reasonably to highly profitable businesses either don't have a product at all, or else have a product that involves no new technology. Businesses that require a hacker or an engineer are by far the exception. To the extent that the philosophy of Hacker News is wrong, it's mostly because it ignores that fact that for 98% of the people reading this site it would be more profitable for them to open a Korean grocery than to do a website.
What I do see, and agree with, is good business would have a ridiculously hard time finding a great programmer. I don't even think good programmers could consistently identify the great hackers with the ability to propel a startup forward. Also finding that individual is only half the battle - putting their expertise to work optimally for a startup is no easy task.
I have seen articles on how hackers cannot identify good business/marketing/sales people. I recall one article explaining quite well how a smart programmer with a good business concept was sunk by his bad selection in a sales guy.
We can just generalize this argument to 'Identifying people great at a task is difficult, even more so if you come from a disjoint background'. Perhaps adding in 'A subset of those great people will be able to leverage that skill at your startup'.
Let me summarize with an analogy.
Finding a great ship is an enormous challenge - especially for someone who is neither a ship-builder or sailer. But owning a great ship does not guarantee faster travel; the winds and currents must be harnessed.
You're best off hiring someone you can work effectively with, rather than the best programmer in the world (as for judging someone you can work with long term, that's another problem).
"Non-technical people can't judge technical people."
Once someone learns enough to judge technical skills, they are declared technical and so don't disprove the statement.
We're not trying to tell the business people that we could do their jobs better than they. That would be arrogance.
That being said, the arrogance displayed in many of the comments on this thread and others like it is one of the things I dislike most here. There's this pervasive attitude that hackers > businesspeople, and while it's ridiculous for a business guy to think he can hire a programmer (or be of much value to one), you never see articles about how hackers are helpless without business people or how a hacker would have no idea how to hire a marketing or sales guy (and shouldn't even try).
Maybe I'm overreacting because I'm one of those who straddle the line, but this kind of arrogance serves no one.