Have you looked at the subreddits? I spend a lot of time in /programming/ & I find that it has much better articles than HN. Or maybe it's just me, I'm more interested in code than startups.
I used to swear by programming.reddit.com, until the discussions went the way of reddit.com. Whatever can be said for link quality, I find the discussions here 100x better.
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/
The reddit RSS feed is also considerably better & I find that invaluable.