Discussion here is generally of higher quality because of the people who come here. Lots of developers of all kinds, tech company employees, insiders, people who invented the algorithms you read about in the books, people who invented the programming languages we use.

I for one ignore the articles and go straight for the comments. I care a lot more about what smart people think than the articles themselves. The news that get posted here are just provocation to get them to post their opinions. Chances are any truly important information will be directly quoted by HN comments anyway.

Only occasionally. I think this was more true 10 years ago when the pool of commenters and topics on the site was smaller.

At this point I'd agree with GP that HN conversations are only better than large subreddits, a bit worse than most focused medium-sized subreddits, and a lot worse than more focused subreddits. The level of in-depth conversation you'll get about Go on r/golang or Emacs on r/emacs is much, much higher than this site. In fact you can get a decent amount of arbitrage karma bringing links from those subs onto here :)

I think the sweetspot of this site is a technical topic that's a bit out of the mainstream. These threads usually take a couple hours to really develop but because of that they usually avoid the kneejerk negative/contrarian toplevel posts that the community posts on more accessible topics which usually derail conversation quality. As such you usually get thoughtful, well-developed, good-faith takes on these threads. A good example is a Lisp or Forth related thread.

> I care a lot more what smart people think about the articles than the articles themselves.

Frankly, I'd say that the article authors are smarter on average than the article commenters and in any case are vastly more careful and informed on average than the article commenters. There are of course exceptions to the averages, but it doesn't balance out, because the worst article commenters are infinitely worse than the worst article authors and wreck the discussions for everyone else.

> The news are just provocation to get them to post their opinions.

That's precisely the problem!

Reading the comments on non-tech submissions that a person has some basic knowledge of should make them aware that the vast majority of comments are simply confidently pronounced ignorance. (This is particularly evident on medical and health related submissions.) Then they should start to notice that, to almost as high a percentage, the comments on tech are just as much confidently pronounced ignorance.