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.