It's hard to hold constant all variables except one between persons. Is it reasonable to expect that a programmer with drive and skill wouldn't know about some internet lore, wouldn't know of resources like freenode and stackoverflow.com, and wouldn't know something about the variety of technologies that are out there?
The direction of causation is tricky to unwind. I think you're right, however. If a two programmers were of equal competence, except one only knew about Java and the other sat on Hacker News all day, the Hacker News reader would probably only have a small head start. However, it would be hard to find two programmers that met those descriptions and were of equal competence.
I recently discovered that you can pay freelancers for 2 hours work on a small problem [an edge case], and save yourself 10 hours. You don't even have to pay stock, as people are pleased to be paid $80 for an hour's work.
EDIT: However, knowing what to ask for (what you need doing) is important!
Good programmers can get far removed from the tools advocated on hacker news when they work for large companies. They tend to use a lot of internal tools. That doesn't mean they can't pick up external tools later.
The direction of causation is tricky to unwind. I think you're right, however. If a two programmers were of equal competence, except one only knew about Java and the other sat on Hacker News all day, the Hacker News reader would probably only have a small head start. However, it would be hard to find two programmers that met those descriptions and were of equal competence.