Just yesterday someone posted a comment with links to UI design libraries that I've been subconsciously wishing for in my dreams (humaans, undraw.co), and I used it in a product demo. As a self-taught technologist, HN has exposed me to SICP, functional programming, and just yesterday someone posted a book about Data Structures and Algorithms that I started reading. Dang was quoted as describing HN as a "hall of mirrors" or "fractal tree."
The author's focus on the controversial political parts of HN seems to me like going to a music festival and commenting on the food trucks. Yes, it's part of the experience, but that's not why people go and not what makes it magical.
Communicating the beauty of unfamiliar technical topics to a lay reader is much harder than politics, but the New Yorker has done well at that elsewhere (I like the Sanjay and Jeff profile). Moderation is an interesting topic in its own right, though, especially in the age of the IRA and meme-warfare.
A romp through approaches to generative adversarial networks described as if they are realms in a Tolkein world. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20251308
(This week's) complete guide to building a terminal text editor from scratch in C which gently holds your hand at each step: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14046446
Stumbling down the root domain of the above link leads you to the collected archive of _why_the_lucky_stiff, a hacker artist who created technical documentation as if it were a work of literature, animating and writing songs about ruby in a unique aesop meets kaftka meets neutral milk hotel style, and who then suddenly disappeared and deleted his whole internet persona, transmitting a 96-page oblique missive years later as individual PCL files. https://viewsourcecode.org/why/
Someone documents how using the 30+ year old, tiny awk language let him do what all the latest fad big data tools couldn't https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20293579
Several posts this past week from natashenka's Project Zero blog led me to her passion project of being the world's leading expert in hacking tamagutchis, which read as part instructional and part love letter to digital pets http://natashenka.ca/
Even though I'm ostensibly in the same industry as retail brokerages, I've never understood their business models as well as I did when I read this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20276551
Not to keep going, but just to have a less lame example than a couple introductory textbooks -- I didn't mean to imply HN as a surrogate class syllabus