I think the issue is that the things that seem insightful to relatively unskilled programmers seem obvious to very skilled ones. A lot of the blog posts I see on sites like this rehash issues that I thought were settled a long time ago, but what's happening is that people understand things for themselves over and over again. And it's actually helpful when they write it up, because their writeups then lead other people to understand these things. Thus there is a steady stream of posts about the same set of ideas that are always helpful to people, but are still clogging HN.
The trouble is that there's no way for people who have already understood something to stop seeing the same old posts. I see three options: - get rid of the less-skilled people - keep the less-skilled people, but stop them from learning from these posts - somehow let people opt out of seeing posts on things they understand, but keep them around for other people to see
It seems obvious that the third solution is correct, but I don't yet know how to do it.