This only looked at submissions it seems. I gather a lot more useful information lurking the comments. I think discussions in the comments here are far ahead of the mainstream.
I don't know if it's a good thing or not, but I've definitely gotten into the habit of opening the comments of a post before the link itself.
Discussions on HN and the articles they comment on can buy into the hype of the day to just as large a degree as anywhere else. Go back a few years. How many people were confidently predicting that widespread door-to-door autonomous taxis were just 2 or 3 years out?
Sadly my feeling is that during the past few years these posts have been becoming rarer and are less upvoted that they used to be. Controversial or very assertive comments seem to have more success. I fear that Hacker News is slowly turning into Reddit.