Not infallible - I could talk tech near-perfectly (I am a native speaker of BS), but I am most definitely not a coder pretty much at all - but a good start.
Also, using HN and its fads as a measure of motivation sounds a little elitist. There are really awesome and motivated coders out there who couldn't care less about politics, mainstream tech media news articles, gadgets, Apple-does-this, Google-does-that, cool new language or JS toy of the week... these coders are likely focused on their code instead.
Programming is a wide field, there's much more to it than the front page discussions on HN can cover.
Of course, if you're looking for a Web developer to make "cool new stuff" for the latest fadgets..
You make light of web development, but that's driving the enormous demand for programmers in recent years and all of our salaries. I bumped my pay $20K when I took this job and I'm now asking for $30K more after a year. Most fields calcify after a few years and salaries level off as the managers do their thing. But making "cool new stuff" and the "latest fadgets" is still really hard. It might be the fashion industry, but business is booming.