For me the coolest thing about HN is the breadth of experts here for any (even niche) tech field. This allows for in depth understanding of new products (when someone who actually worked on the team making it is here) or calling out conspiracy theories about why some company shut down some product (because they have inside knowledge and can actually explain the reasoning).
I can't count how many times I've read 'I work on the team that built that' with some new insights or opinions just sitting nested in a comment chain 4 levels deep.
Hadley Wickham (R & beautiful API's for data stuff) once replied to my comment about buying a dead tree copy of his book and recommended the HTML version.
Interesting you have jblow on there, as I just was watching his programming stream on twitch yesterday and he said he doesn't really come to HN much anymore. His reasoning was basically that he wanted a place where programmers were working on harder things (basically CRUD web devs).
I think he is missing a lot of content on here if that's his true opinion. I think you can find all sorts of varying levels of depths on a vast amount of technical issues.
Agreed. The wide spread of experts who come out and give first hand accounts of the event/product being discussed adds a tremendous amount of value to the discussion on the site.
Discussion on this site is by no means perfect but it is miles ahead of the alternatives out there.
I can't count how many times I've read 'I work on the team that built that' with some new insights or opinions just sitting nested in a comment chain 4 levels deep.