Based on what I read of dekhn's internal Google+ posts when he was at Google, that couldn't be further from the truth. This is someone who cares greatly about both good engineering and making a positive impact on the world.
It feels like a second order name drop (perhaps a prestige drop?) by immediately indicating your access to internal posts and identification of him by his username. I've been aware of him before but not enough to know his HN or common username!
I'm not actually cynical, I'm just being straightforward in the sense that there aren't enough famous figures in my line of work for me to namedrop any of them.
Lots of people here on HN have contact with "famous" people. It's not usually a big deal.
It shouldn't really be surprising that an article about Google (a company with 145K full-time-employees) might attract a few people who know people. Isn't that why we read HN?
