For quite a while, HN has been dominated by negative comments in general, many of which are also simply ignorant. Occasionally, you'll see an old-time comment, full of relevant facts (and generally with some balance, since it's usually hard to be 100% biased when using facts).

Therefore, I mostly avoid the comments on HN these days. The stories themselves can sometimes be interesting, but now I'm finding ol' slashdot is better for that.

My suggestion to fix this is to focus on stories that are "intellectually stimulating" and dropping topical news altogether (or having them in a separate frontpage).

"Industry News and Gossip" is part of the problem, I believe. It doesn't promote discussions that are intellectually stimulating, and it doesn't attract people who value intellectual stimulation. There's a thousand other news sites - it's never what made HN valuable.

Sadly, HN has that pesky "news" in its name, despite the guidelines seeming to not be about news: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

  anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.