I'm not sure I'd say it's important, in the way that Blender getting open-sourced was important or anything like that. But it's a game that a lot of HN readers liked when it was posted a few days ago, and now the source is available under the GPL, so I thought people might be interested. Not so much a major news story; more of an FYI kind of submission.
I don't think you can compare. There are things you can only pick up from learning from other people (or re-inventing everything yourself), and there are other skills you have to develop yourself.