HN is not actually good at programming and CS, either.
I've seen plenty of experts here on stuff like Prolog, Lisp, Forth, Smalltalk (Alan Kay has posted on here), tons on Java, Python, R, C++, Julia...it goes on and on.
I chat about esoteric languages on the Godot engine discord server once in a while.
HN excels as a general purpose forum for technical discussions relating to computer science.
The biggest difference is HN is strongly anti-humor, primarily because of the weird pathology the culture here has about Reddit and appearing "mainstream." But the lack of memes here doesn't make the rest of the content better, rather it tends to result in aggression, knee-jerk contrarianism and overconfident assertions in ignorance becoming low effort virtue signals instead.
I'm never surprised anymore by how much productive discussion is entombed in Discord servers, just sad. Servers are hidden from the public, not web-searchable, barely searchable internally, horrible threading, notification hell, proprietary software, zero data ownership - it could hardly be a worse public discussion forum if it tried. Which makes sense because it was designed to be something else. Sigh... got a link to any of these servers that have better discussion than HN?
I’ll edit this comment with some links when I get back to my pc if I remember
I'm not sure it's even possible for one to be. As the saying goes, "None of us is as dumb as all of us."
For a thousand niche subjects in CompSi, there are 0-100 levels of knowledge.
The discourse can be great, and can also go off the rails.
One problem is Hacker News are terrible at recognizing dry humor. 90% of readers interpret tongue-in-cheek posts as face-value. And among those who recognize the humor, 77% want an accompanying "/s" flag iff (day-of-week mod 13 == -2).
I get pushback when I say "If something is too ridiculous, assume it is a joke." Because people are insistent that there are people who really believe dumb shit. They're not wrong, but if they are sincere, why treat them as anything but a joke? It's not like you're going to convincingly correct them when they make such grave errors. So why not a joke? What's the old saying? I'd rather laugh than cry.