This is what I think of as the ideal HN - posts that are "How I Made X" or "How I Debugged Y" (or even "How Someone Else Made X", like the Amazon menu post, though the author ended up making their own implementation too).
No product announcement links, no Valley gossip rag links, no endless picking apart of every tiny Apple and Google thing.
What makes HN special are posts about making things. Everything else is just the same chatter all the other tech sites have.
Not sure I agree there. There are lots of interesting posts which sink on that queue and fall off it without getting sufficient votes to be seen, while less interesting but more controversial stuff floats to the top. All it would take is a few score more people voting technical stories up consistently to change the story mix.
Who says there aren't already? Note that what's on the front page is just up-voted content. Tons of stuff (some quite good) slips through the cracks every day.
