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, tho

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.