I actually managed to find an insightful comment on that 4chan thread which I've edited slightly for clarity. I'm reposting it here because I think folks might find it an interesting perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of HN. It is also an opinion I happen to agree with.

Anyways, the appeal of Hacker News is the occasional interesting technical story, and the high quality comment threads that accompany it. Here's the LuaJIT author talking about implementing interpreters in C vs. Assembly:

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.lua.general/75426 and the accompanying discussion I remember reading on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2588696

You'll have to take my word for it, but there's a high technical barrier to appreciating this story, and it's accompanied by high quality discussion. If you enjoy reading about that kind of thing, it's well worth sifting through the startup launch pages, endless vim bullshit, reposts and blogspam, limitless iterations on "women in tech", and "how we scaled dick.ly with node and mongo" fluff pieces to find that delicious technical meat.