A nice language makes for shorter, more expressive code, sure, but that's like having a fast car that handles well; it still matters more where you're driving it. If someone is making a trip with a caravan of a million rust buckets to a nice place, why would they care about some Porsche owner moaning about how that is all so very wrong?
If PHP developers complained all the time about how programming sucks, then you could maybe tell them to use a better language. But the PHP devs aren't really complaining, rather people who aren't even using it.
People use Wikipedia. I dare say Wikipedia improved a lot of lives a lot. Meanwhile, a gazillion static blog generators written in hip language of the day prove no real benefit over notepad, or this textarea right here. It's like making a trip with a handful of people to a place that's been explored by others decades ago, and then being bitter that nobody cares, and hating on the roaring party going on next door.
If you want to make language A or B more popular and better accessible when it comes to web hosting, write the killer app in it that nobody can do without, and which can't be implemented in PHP. That should be simple, since PHP sucks so much, right?
Lastly, is the HN code nice? I wouldn't even know, it's that irrelevant. The HTML it puts out sure is atrocious, but even that doesn't matter.