Right, there's really nothing fundamentally different about HN and reddit other than the audience. At their core they are both vote-based commenting communities - and the generally high quality of comments makes me wish more sites (like Gawker, Engadget, etc) would use the same mechanism. Yes there is a lot of herd behavior but it's leagues better than the "First post!" cruft you see everywhere else.

Got some suggestions for good subreddits?

Have you seen the level of commentary around the 'Net? I agree that Reddit's fallen down a bit, but it's way better than any other free and generalist site on the web. Heck, it's better than most soft-specialist sites. Reddit is in the same class of website as Digg, major newspapers, and YouTube - have you been to those sites and read their comments sections? Don't, if you want to keep any faith in humanity. By contrast, Reddit is almost reasonable. It's below HackerNews/Groklaw quality, and probably even below ArsTechnica quality, but it's still above average overall, especially among non-specializing and free sites.