Or am I missing something? Is there value added in this process? Or do these concerns end up reaching a much wider audience?
Put another, less inflammatory way, Hacker News tends very highly towards the ephemeral. I would argue certainly more highly than reddit and possibly even more highly than something like 4chan.
This creates a detrimental effect because the discussion around these news stories is more long-lived than HN (the discussion vector) would let us believe.
This creates something I'd call the Hacker News Timeshift - blogspam based on yesterday's news purely on the off chance that the generated blog post will act as a vector for spurring the truncated discussion, thus generating plenty of ancillary or almost coincidental traffic to the blogspam.
Anyone who visits the new stories page once a day will see this effect in action for roughly 50% of the stories that were on the news page yesterday.
Regardless, it's finally dawning on me that the never-ending stream of Apple punditry is a fucking bore, including the "high quality" sources in the echo-chamber such as DF and 5by5.
Similar to the way Daring Fireball blogs about Apple stories, except he doesn't make HN as much.