It's similar to any other corporate/institutionalised group - imagine the "<College_name> Anarchists", or "<College_name> Communists", or so on. "Hacker" News, run by one of the most institutionalized Venture Capital companies out there, is simply marketing at this point.
Luckily, the quality of discussion for tech matters, and the players in the industry that participate, still make this place one of the best ones on the internet for technical discussion. But don't expect the political/historical/cultural/non-technical discussions to be any more insightful than any other group of people having opinions on those subjects.
Yeah, it's kind of weird. The technical (and many other discussions) are often quite insightful here. It's always fascinating to get into some obscure topic and have a world-renowned subject-matter-expert suddenly drop in to give their two cents or clarify what they meant in some quoted piece.
I'm quickly learning to just steer clear of the political discussions though. They're usually a very jarring reminder that intelligence in one or several areas does not preclude intellectual dishonesty and intentional ignorance in another.
This mirrors my experience perfectly. Conduct on HN is uncommonly civil (for the internet) across the board - props to Dang and whoever else moderates things. Insightful discussion, however, is almost entirely limited to the extremely technical submissions. From biochemistry to compilers to machine learning, they consistently attract participation at a truly impressive caliber.
Sometimes I wonder what HN would be like if it were somehow possible to preemptively block the majority of the "fluff" articles that make it to the front page. I guess there's no way to automate such a determination though, and even if there were any such action would probably anger the majority of the user base.
Luckily, the quality of discussion for tech matters, and the players in the industry that participate, still make this place one of the best ones on the internet for technical discussion. But don't expect the political/historical/cultural/non-technical discussions to be any more insightful than any other group of people having opinions on those subjects.