Its a well known fact PHP powers a ridiculous number of very high traffic sites. It's also a well known fact that HN favourites like ruby struggle.

PHP is extremely easy to set up and use. Ruby is a quagmire of dependencies and build environments.

This makes php bashing on HN tedious and disconnected from reality. There is a clear preference here for tech that pays more and but let's not try to pass it off as a technical preference.