Literally why I started to come here. r/programming because a derelict wasteland. What commentary you got was frivolous and unhelpful. Posts about CockroachDB there would all be jokes or other commentary on its name, while you'd have the engineers who created it in here. I started to notice a lot of posts with mediocre discussion had a related post in the r/hackernews. While I had come here now and then, I started to see that I could actually still learn stuff here and decided to skip the middle man.

self selection in action

also quite a haven for bots these days. with robust monetization and a need to assure people that you're interacting with actual people (budling consensus) or clicking ads, you need some measure of "prove they're real". HN don't do that.