Most of the content on HN appears to be about business, rather than about programming itself, or focuses on lucrative but technically-uninteresting corners of programming (like web design). This business focus makes sense, since HN is run by a VC firm and a lot of non-technical users who would like to run tech companies hang out here.

There's a related category: technically-uninteresting posts about technically-uninteresting projects that are essentially advertising for some small business. This is probably, again, related to HN being run by a VC firm.

(For context: I browse HN daily, but I never use the front page -- the values of the average HN user are far away from mine, so sorting by newest produces more interesting content. If you find the HN frontpage devoid of posts about programming, try sorting by newness rather than popularity, since technically-interesting stuff gets fewer upvotes here than wide-audience stuff about cryptocurrency or large corporations.)