So glad to see people doing silly things that in fact require skill. This is why I come to hackernews.
Keep up great work with this wonderful attitude!
I mean, I'm pretty sure I'd be way richer right now if I had just taken a job at some bigco. Or kept doing consulting.
I don't feel that what I'm doing right now (building a startup because I can) is fundamentally different from my demoscene past (coding computer graphics because I could). Sure, some startups make some people obscenely rich, but the vast majority don't :-) It's not too different from art or AI hobbying or gaming or game modding in that sense.
It is - Tikej's point isn't that it's not a skill - but rather that it's not the right place to share these. Think of the difference between a "Startup News" and "Hacker News". Hacker news used to be very deep on tech topics, now those deep topic have become more rare.
It is refreshing to be reminded of the myriad of ways computers can interact with the world! I recently refreshed my love for technology by getting into 3D printing, it's nice to have a tangible result for my efforts behind the keyboard. The machine is surprisingly rudimentary as well, and reminds me of old school CNC machines, so it's relaxing in the way driving a classic car can be. You can understand all the parts and their purpose intuitively, as they operate in the real world.
You could make the opposite argument: the "right kind of stories" includes being unpredictable (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), so up-weighting votes from users who are good at picking those would lead to a less predictable, more interesting front page. Conversely, the median vote tends to be for the same few hot topics, leading to a more samey (as well as more sensational) front page.
My bet is that it wouldn't change much either way, because the problems with voting seem to flow from the voting mechanism itself, not from which users are doing it. Internet upvoting is the ultimate reflexive reaction, which excludes reflection, and reflection—the slower cognitive process which considers something before reacting to it and is thus able to see something new—is the quality that picks up on uncorrelated bits and makes for good taste. (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)
If that's true, then instead of trying to squeeze more signal out of upvotes we should add a new mechanism that encourages reflection over reflexivity. Flagging is closer to that than voting is, so something like an up-flag might be worth trying: i.e. "this deserves extra attention because of how good it is".
In many cases, writing a quick comment to get position in the discussion and then editing or self-replying might be the only way to get engagement from other thoughtful commenters. And a response that takes more than a few hours (or in some cases, minutes) to compose is likely to have very little engagement at all.
There is a comment feed, but it's heavily biased towards more recent comments and doesn't have enough context to be useful in many cases. Perhaps the "exalt / flare" system that you suggest could help to flag up more interesting comments in a slower stream.
At the moment, unless you check your own comments or look out for your karma and investigate any changes, you're likely to miss out even on replies to your own comments, let alone interesting comments on older articles.