One peculiarity about HN culture I found is that commenters will often comment something tangental to the subject of the post, so I often find myself reading really insightful comments on threads I otherwise have zero interest in.
Four days ago I was reading a thread I did have interest in about hiring freezes at Google and Facebook, and there was a tangential thread, which was even more insightful, between the Linux maintainer for ext4 (the Linux filesystem probably 99% of Android devices use, and a high percentage of Linux servers too), and another Googler/Xoogler about whether the Google storage engineering team could make non-incremental contributions, and which contributions were worthwhile and which weren't ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32323734 ).
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Four days ago I was reading a thread I did have interest in about hiring freezes at Google and Facebook, and there was a tangential thread, which was even more insightful, between the Linux maintainer for ext4 (the Linux filesystem probably 99% of Android devices use, and a high percentage of Linux servers too), and another Googler/Xoogler about whether the Google storage engineering team could make non-incremental contributions, and which contributions were worthwhile and which weren't ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32323734 ).
That's why I read HN comments. You never know when they'll go on a very interesting tangent. For very loose values of tangent.
Also, the "{person involved} here! {Comment full of insider information}."
One could probably compile a book of great comments in this vein that have appeared on HN over the years.