Your comment makes me realize that I consume HN differently than many others, because I've never seen a post with comments disabled and I've been around here for at least ten years. It's not that I don't think they don't exist — they obviously do because you're mentioning them. I've just never encountered one, primarily because I don't casually browse HN, ever. I subscribe to a pushbullet channel that notifies me when a post hits 500 up votes. That's it. The list of submissions on the home page (even on reddit) is just overwhelming to me so I use the pushbullet channel as a sort of community curated "best of" or "trending" signal.

Not to say that I don't procrastinate or waste time doing other nonsense. I can definitely spend a lot of time reading HN comments, as I'm doing right now.

Anyway,anyone who finds themselves with a problem with HN should try that out :)

I assumed the main purpose was to show off the ycombinator batches when they launch.