I think it's partly just the audience. HN seems to have a lot of professional programmers, which is similar to but not quite the same as computational scientist

I think it's partly just the audience. HN seems to have a lot of professional programmers, which is similar to but not quite the same as computational scientists. That doesn't mean there's no overlap, but for example I haven't met a people (other than one Google person) at a recent physics-informed learning or scientific machine learning conference who is a HN reader, which really explained why none of the stories in those domains have been getting HN traction even though HN seems very ML/AI-positive. Julia is in this weird middle ground where its ML/AI stories seem to get a lot of HN traction as a programming languages topic given the HN audience, but in reality it has a lot more people doing things like research in numerical linear algebra, numerical differential equations, statistics, bioinformatics, etc. but fast methods for block-banded matrices won't hit science press.