It's actually pretty interesting that small/lifestyle businesses get a lot of respect on Hacker News (pinboard, improvely, Appointment reminder and their creators are all very well revered here). In fact, a lot more than the general population (from my point of view) have for those businesses.
It seems to me that the focus at HN is on startups that aim for huge growth, and not really small businesses; especially not small, stable businesses that don't have much potential to grow very large. The subject of the article is a small business that won't really scale well. One of the biggest topics of discussion at HN is around the topic of scaling a business.
I'm glad to see an article like this which reminds us that small businesses can be an important part of our society. I also see some efforts by some people in the ycombinator network to expand beyond the mechanics of doing startups. I attended last year's startup school and was blown away and inspired by one of the speakers, Danae Ringelmann:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPbHf4i6CrQ&list=PLQ-uHSnFig...
This is because a pretty large percentage of the readers of HN are pretty smart - they recognise that a good lifestyle business is what smart people should be building.
