The only reason we are here doing this sort of thing is because we are “Justin Bieber” fans. We aren’t here because changing a tire is interesting, unique, nor will we learn anything from it – especially this particular tire (HN is like the Toyota Corolla of “vehicles” compared to the other complex mission-critical distributed systems that make up other popular web services).
Speak for yourself, some of us (at least me) find "postmortum writeups" FASCINATING!!
I read them every chance I get. Most of the time the root cause wouldn't have affected me, but, I still occasionally will read one, think "oh crap! that could have bit me too!", then add the fix to my "Standard Operating Procedures" mental model, or whatnot. Some of us are still trying to "finish the game" with zero losses. :)
Though... I've also read at least one "interesting" postmortem with complex operating scenarios and thought to myself (partially joking) that their failure isn't what they thought it was. The failure was having an unnecessarily complicated architecture in the first place, with too many abstractions and too much bloat. ;-) I would have "just" written it in C++ on Debian... ;-) (I'm exaggerating)
(I know that "my way" is fantastic.. until you need to scale across people)