The commentary here has always been a lot better than reddit for the large majority of stories. Reedit has its place because you can custom tailor it to what you want to see and the best comments sorting helps with seeing a few good comments. That community is a lot more hostile and likely to digress into a pun comment chain though.
To me, reddit is like a really cool charter school with lots of AP and college level classes with a few brilliant geniuses, but at the end of the day it is still a high school. HN is more like a fine graduate program at a respected university. That's my take.
Do we think we have more interesting commentary? (e.g. is that why we post those articles here?)