Is there really such a large crossover that climbing.com makes it to hacker news? Sure, this is interesting, but I love that this site is focused on tech.
Anecdotally the climbing gym is the only semi-public place in which I've walked past someone browsing HN; without material stats I would still guess developers and people in tech vastly outnumber other fields among climbing gym members.
Planet Granite Sunnyvale was my haunt when I lived in CA. Almost everybody it seemed were wearing tshirts with the same logos you see driving down 101, in those days (10 years ago before that was uncool).
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
A lot of devs love climbing. Problem solving is part of it, especially if you climb a route for the first time. Very different area but similar approaches need to be deployed to succeed.
Plus its properly great and fulfilling activity that very few sports can deliver (IMHO), not requiring massive investment or some ridiculously long and difficult trips to just get to it (gyms, if you want to climb in Patagonia or Antarctic then its a different game altogether).
The headline is about the guy who created new procedures and standardization. Those are certainly technologies by many definitions. The article talks about how he created a lot of what we consider the modern climbing gym. Fitness innovations are also a form of technology.
Hacker news never claimed to be exclusively about digital technology, or electronic technology.
This is an article telling the story of someone passionate about creating something new and innovative. Seems pretty aligned to me?