It's useful (although the tools for extracting mail passwords and wifi keys see far more use from me). Nirsoft tools have saved me hours, especially SysExporter (iirc).
Hacker News isn't really about news, although that's a big part of it. Really, it should be called HackerJoy.
The guidelines say:
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
I'm not seeing the "news" aspect though.