HN is like a teenager going through an emo period. We all need a haircut and some new music to listen to. And a date.
Check out Y Combinator Hacker News if you haven't already. It's a phenomenal social news site that really distills the best intelligent stuff on the web all in one place.
I ditched my daily Google Reader addiction because all the stuff I liked would appear on Hacker News anyway. Its not just tech stuff -- smart ideas from sociology, poli sci, economics, business, science, etc. regularly appear as well.
Unfortunately, here come the social media growing pains for this great site. There are ongoing experiments to try to preserve the overall character of the site.
My 2 cents: People need to learn to shut up if they have nothing valuable to say. I think that at scale, noise will kill the usefulness of a user generated content site faster than anything else. So either people need to change, or the site needs to hide dumb comments / site submissions, and fast.