Hadley Wickham (R & beautiful API's for data stuff) once replied to my comment about buying a dead tree copy of his book and recommended the HTML version.
Interesting you have jblow on there, as I just was watching his programming stream on twitch yesterday and he said he doesn't really come to HN much anymore. His reasoning was basically that he wanted a place where programmers were working on harder things (basically CRUD web devs).
I think he is missing a lot of content on here if that's his true opinion. I think you can find all sorts of varying levels of depths on a vast amount of technical issues.
Low level optimization - nkurz BeeOnRope dragontamer
Programming Languages - pcwalton jordwalke chrisseaton
Other people who work on well-known things that comment frequently:
jblow (The Witness, Braid) phire (The Dolphin Emulator) pizlonator (Webkit/JSC)
I made a web app just so I could subscribe and read all their comments via RSS: http://hnblogs.thume.ca/