You may be right about Arrington, but that's not how I see HN. I haven't noticed any prejudice here against things like Flash video games for kids. On the contrary, patio11 and his bingo cards (surely a lower bound for whatever definition of 'cool' you're talking about) are kind of local heroes.
OK, that's not how you see HN. I wasn't writing about HN originally. Every sentence fragment began with "TechCrunch." :)
On HN, you have a slew of TC-style masturbatory stories about funding and then you've got a handful of less exciting "hard luck" cases that touch people because they're like orphans who sing and dance.
Like that post about the plumber -- it's Puritan Work Ethic pr0n.
Most HN readers seem to think they're going to end up with the funding (the former), but at the same time they want to hear from those heartwarming orphans (the latter).