Meh. All the kids are chasing the AI money, so there's a lot of AI idiocy crowding out the good stuff.
You kids get off my lawn.
Just keep in mind hacker news is hosted by ycombinator, which helps match Stanford and UCB CS grads with slightly older Stanford and UCB grads (with a smattering of MIT and UIUC grads) who will give them money in exchange for shares in relatively poorly managed organizations pumping highly speculative "products."
The objective isn't to make anything interesting, it's to make money so the Stanford and UCB grads can continue the cycle. That being said, some of these companies do interesting things by accident. And not all of them are hell-scape "sincerity begins at 90 hours per week" code-monkey zoos.
The "interesting" stuff seems to come out of open source projects (See Dick Gabriel's "Innovation Happens Elsewhere.") But sometimes you get overlap.
But the venue is (largely, but not exclusively) for kids whose interest in their startup extends 18 months to the moment they can sell whatever ISOs they collected and move on to the next cash vehicle before eventually "retiring" as a Facebook or Verizon VP and write think pieces about how <foo> is a game-changer and will change the way we think about media for decades to come. (Where <foo> is: cryptography, corba, J2EE, SOAP, AJAX, P2P, Bitcoin, Mobile, Python, VR, AR, OpenGL, Swift, Go, RISC-V, Rust, THE CLOUD, <bar>-sharing, ML, AI, LLMs, CNNs, TensorFlow, ChatGPT, etc. and <bar> is ride, home, spouse, etc.)
But no, I'm not bitter.
(Seriously though... fads come and go. HN is sort of like the Soap Opera Digest for Sili Valley's amnesiac creatives. Dig deep enough and I'm sure you'll find SOMETHING, even if it's a rant. And the half-life of memory in our community appears to be a couple of years. So just wait a bit and you'll get another wave of recent grads who just discovered LtU or the Jargon file and we'll get more interesting posts. But the kids are all right and eventually they figure out why us olds did the stupid stuff we used to do but will re-create some pretty interesting stuff after realizing the constraints we thought were unchangeable are just illusions.
Sturgeon's Law applies here, but there's definitely some good stuff if you dig. Also, it's possible your interests have gotten more specific and what you're seeing is things that are either very general or... as you mentioned... outside your interest list.)