To be fair, I suspect there is a correlation between being interested in things like HackerNews and being an above-average developer. I've met some pretty poor developers who couldn't really give a stuff about innovations, best practice, etc, they just churned out mediocre code they'd learned at university, or copypasted, then clocked off at 5pm.
I get what you're saying, but there was an equally unconfirmed supposition in the parent comment that all types of developer (good and bad) were equally likely to use Hacker News. I'm just saying there are at least some data points in a small anecdotal sample that did not confirm this equal distribution and so it might be worth questioning whether that is true. Sure, to be certain, we'd need to actually measure it somehow.
I am half kidding, probably we are on the same page. I tend to ask where people get their technical news fix during SWE interviews and observe a strong correlation with quality of answers (won't speculate on which sources are better than others) and strength of developer skills.
I mean, if you just use the metric of "care enough about my industry to follow news and discussion threads about it", HN is already going to filter bad out somewhat, I'd imagine.
I don't assume it's the top half only, but it should weed out the worst kind, right?
Welcome to HN!