And I guess there's always google juice to consider - may be more relevant to pages about Hackers, but if it's being indexed that often than all the sites HN links to must benefit from association.
(I think this comment really shows my SEO naivety, but I hope you get the gist.)
I think the HN homepage pagerank is diluted too much to make much of a difference, first of all there are 30 other outgoing links, and besides that they change all the time.
Google 'juice' is most likely best collected by having links on authoritative pages that will keep the link visible on the same page for a long time, and that have relatively few outgoing links.
(I think this comment really shows my SEO naivety, but I hope you get the gist.)