Just to be clear: I agree with your point on focusing on creating value. And after I read your comment, I agree that none of the startups in the articles are truly creating that much value.
However, is it that simple to qualify when you're creating value? If I had read the article before HN's comments, I'd have thought the startup is cool (admittedly trivial and silly, but we have a lot of those nowadays), rather than parasitic. I'd have thought it's just a clever hack in helping more efficient distribution - in the true spirit of capitalism. Yes, while it would shift the value to rich people, it also free up the rich people's time, so they (rich people) can create more value. Assuming that rich people is richer because society decides that their time is more valuable, they can create more value in the same amount of times of some other poorer people.
Of course, that might be not morally justifiable. But creating value and being morally correct is orthogonal.
I'm not living in SF the SV area, but I've a few friends there. Every time they talked to me about startup ideas, I've always felt off about those ideas. I kept telling myself that trivial value is still value, and potentially if it can help many people, the net gain would still be large. How do I know where to draw the line?
Edit: it seems like quite a few people have problem with my post, so let me rephrase the middle paragraph a bit:
Ignoring the mentioning of rich/ poor, parking spot is a commodity. And just like other commodity in life, everyone values it differently. What's wrong in letting people paying for what they think it's worth for? The rich will always have advantage in buying commodity, and that's a fundamental issue in our society, but that's an entirely separate problem to fix, and the solution isn't telling people to stop producing commodity, or distributing them.
In this specific case of parking lot, it's bad either way because a private company is skimming profit from public space.