Indeed. HN is an echo chamber like most things of its ilk. It's just like the Emmy (etc.) awards; actors praising actors for acting; the rest of the world is largely orthogonal.

The amount of pretense and smug here isn't any less about its domain than any other self-selected community.

I'm also skeptical about that. It depends on whether or not the smartest content aligns with people's financial interests. Sometimes the smartest content goes against most people's financial interests so it is heavily downvoted.

HN is a financially-oriented tribe. It's like in the Bitcoin community. Only the pro-Bitcoin content gets upvoted and anti-Bitcoin content gets downvoted. The smartness of the content hardly matters at all. Sometimes the smartest content is at the bottom of the list.

Usually, I read both the top and bottom parts of HN then I get some of the best arguments on both sides.

What's a good argument from the bottom of this thread?

The one from dalbasal on the last page of comments is pretty lengthy and good.

Also, user ailmanki (also last page) said:

>> Every system requires sooner or later another system on top. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory

That would explain what is happening.

The user narrator (also last page) also raises an interesting point:

>> I'm surprised this article didn't mention test driven development for building large pieces of software!

^ He then makes a good case for TDD.

TBH I don't see much improvement in quality at all reading the top comments. Some are dead wrong, for example, the user snidane says (which is/was in the top three on the first page if you ignore nested sub-comments):

>> The tooling is simply not there, so every software project keeps pushing the boundary of what is possible in its own unique fragile way.

Not only is that comment dead wrong (the tooling is definitely there, I've worked on some of these scalability open source tools), it contradicts another comment just above it (by user the_duke) which received just a few more votes:

>> At scale software stops being a technology problem and becomes a people problem. And groups of humans don't scale.

I am not certain about this either. My experience has been that the newer posts on the new tab are frequently more interesting than the posts on the leaderboard.

For instance, the OP is not very well written or informative, IMHO. Great discussion though

Isn't this typical HN though: the quality is most often in the discussion, rather than the original link?

Not necessarily, although I do appreciate the overall quality of discussions here. Reminds me of a very good 00's forum (yes I am a youngling)