Submissions get you an order of magnitude more karma than comments.

It may be different for "famous" people like tptacek and Animats who are instantly recognized in any comment thread, so that lots of highly upvoted comments make up for the comment/submission discrepancy.

Odds of getting a good submission upvoted are very, very low relative to the odds of having a good comment upvoted (will almost always be seen). From an EV perspective, it is better.

See the guidelines for details, but in particular be civil and substantive.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html