I think you underestimate yourself. Or overestimate other people :) There are plenty of uninteresting or non-useful comments posted everywhere, including on HN. Yours in this thread are both interesting and useful.

As a counterpoint, I use these distractions to center myself. There likely are smarter people saying more interesting things, but HN's feed also sometimes has things like "Java StringBuffer and StringBuilder performance". I would much rather read about a "TechMBA/TMBA/TemBA/STEMBA" proposal than about performance of utilities of strings in a language I don't use.