[Reelin]

This mirrors my experience perfectly. Conduct on HN is uncommonly civil (for the internet) across the board - props to Dang and whoever else moderates things. Insightful discussion, however, is almost entirely limited to the extremely technical submissions. From biochemistry to compilers to machine learning, they consistently attract participation at a truly impressive caliber.

Sometimes I wonder what HN would be like if it were somehow possible to preemptively block the majority of the "fluff" articles that make it to the front page. I guess there's no way to automate such a determination though, and even if there were any such action would probably anger the majority of the user base.