As long as you can be thoughtful and curious about tech-related stuff and communicate that thoughtfulness well in text, you belong on HN. There's certainly a tilt toward career SV types for obvious reasons, but this place has everything from genuine, jaw-dropping geniuses to people who are just hobbyists, and a lot in-between.

HN community is awesome. But the comment thread web UI is a big duh! I'm not comparing it with Twitter as I haven't used it much. I can't use HN without Materialistic so on Android. It's so much easier to collapse and expand comments on mobile than having to click on a small + sign.

FWIW, I'm from 1990 as well and I prefer to read plain websites with no JS/CSS. But the HN comment threading interface could use some love.