This somewhat makes sense if you use HN primarily and exclusively as an aggregator. I, and I'm sure many others, also make very heavy use of HN as a discussion board, and in that respect the submitted article is more like a loose word association used to start a discussion. If the submission is titled "Blue is better than purple." but has 300 point and 100 comments, I might take a look regardless of the stupid topic. For all I know, I might encounter some neuroscientists talking shop in the comments.

I also don't particularly care for more Apple news, or some political rant, but the discussions that sometimes follow these can be extremely interesting, and enough so that I would regret their disappearance.