[minimaxir]

Interesting that you give patio as an example, since his last submission was about a year ago, with most of his submissions being 4 years old: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=patio11

Patio's comments, in my experience, are an outlier in quality/length, so it's hard to use that as a trend.

[harvestmoon]

Good catch (used Patio11 because off the top of my head can't think of other popular users by their handle).

Anyway, to me it seems that, with the rare exception, HN is pretty good in each submission being judged on its own.