A big chunk of the HN crowd seems to be self-taught highly intelligent and highly motivated young guys who as a result became astronomically good in their craft. For those people, potential employers will go out of their way and bend their own corporate hiring rules to get the no-degree candidate past HR.
And then there's the normal people working normal jobs. For those, not having a degree will immediately disqualify them from 50%+ of the available job openings. But this crowd is only marginally represented on HN.
Since it's like the last thing where young people need to be disciplined, I'm sure many companies will treat a degree more like a proof that you're reliable enough than like the additional education that it was supposed to be.
That also explains why "degree" has become a HR checkbox where nobody cares about the specific skills that you supposedly learned.
So the correct question is: How do you prove your reliability (by getting a degree) in the cheapest way possible?
As for grad school, that's really only for people who are idealistic and value research higher than job security or having enough money to feed a family.