I was really tired of not being able to find insightful content and discussions on so many other social networks and/or forums. Most of them are full of frivolousness, hatred, squable, swear, all that memes, gifs... etc. Then I came across HN, ~3 years ago. I am not a coder (trying to learn fundamentals on my own, though) and not so fluent in English either. Even though, it was (and is) like brilliant content filter - in terms of both news and comments. You cannot get a grip if you are not civil enough or if you are looking for some visual entertainments. You know, I guess it's all about text. You read. You get valuable information and knowledge from other readers'/writers' experiences. Text is not dead here on HN.
All in all, HN is like "The best content aggregator for humans, by humans".
This place does, however, have its limitations too. For reasons I cannot fathom, the community here absolutely _loves_ to nitpick. People will pick on the absolute nitty-gritty specifics of something some OP said and spend an inordinate amount of time splitting hairs.