For example for a given topic say Scala your audience of possible commentators and upvoters you must draw from the entire population of HN readers that includes programmers, and from this subset you must draw those competent and interested in Scala.

So of course political topics will always be higher rated than technical topics.

"What's different about religion is that people don't feel they need to have any particular expertise to have opinions about it. All they need is strongly held beliefs, and anyone can have those. No thread about Javascript will grow as fast as one about religion, because people feel they have to be over some threshold of expertise to post comments about that. But on religion everyone's an expert."

Prophetic counter-example.