[pavs]

Its very easy to "dilute" a meaning by calling everyone a hacker. Yes strictly speaking you are right, there are Economists hacker, Financial hacker, Life Hacker, Music hacker and so on and so forth.

In the world of the internets the most commonly associated meaning (rightly or wrongly) of the word Hacker is for computer nerds.

In that sense "Hacker News" has nothing to do with hacking, Startup News is more apt description of this community.

[frb]

I would agree if startups were the only topic covered on HN. But they aren't.

HN has always a lot of interesting stuff that has nothing to do with startups. E.g. general CS, psychology, physics ans so on...

[wildmXranat]

Indeed it is. In addition to making it easy to dilute, it's a good search term to capture and stream a specific audience with.