While i agree this is not productive, the primary stated goal for HN has nothing to do with productivity, but has to do with fulfilling one's curiosity and what hackers and makers find interesting.
It doesn't seem out of the ordinary for content these days - the sad thing is that there are tons of tech jumpsites out there, but very few sites that meld business to tech stuff. Despite the name, 'hacker' news was focused on the startup world (it's essentially an advertising mechanism for a startup incubator).
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hacker: apollo 11 source code, call for hackers, machine learning, julia language, origami robot wheels, neural network framework, self-rubber-ducking, swift, A*, SHA3 announcement, Stanford dataset, nature of code, awesome-fonts, equational reasoning, new math for science, nexusUI, dnswatch
misc: beach lego, armstong moon words, people over pleasure, beware of phishing at airbnb, phones on air force one, guide to logic, engineered century/armstrong. lobster economics (content isn't really business, despite the name), rocket-colling icebag, fun with turbulence
business: problem with founders
show HN: gamedevs, coredemia
EDIT: There was some interesting stuff on /newest. I just wish I could do a bit more than push them from 1 to 2.
I'd much rather read more things like http://theaviationist.com/2014/07/21/su-27s-escorted-mh17/ or http://keccak.noekeon.org/