I don't understand this line of thinking, particularly from the Hacker News crowd.
Nobody seems to care if taxi drivers lose out from services like Lyft and Uber. It's called "disruption" and is apparently good for the economy.
A dinosaur like GM loses market share to imports and the same crowd thinks gov't subsidies are required to keep an inefficient industry alive.
GM was not run very intelligently in the '90s (and '80s and '00s), so I definitely feel the urge to let them die, but the economic damage of the 100,000+ layoffs would cost more than the auto bailout.