Makes me wonder when will HN consider creating subcategories ala reddit. Surely the site gets enough traffic to take it to the next level.
Hackernews isn't that active, it has a very big user base that view but the number of people actively contributing (comments, submissions) is pretty small. During the last 6 minutes there has been 30 comments on HN, for reddit there has been over 100 in the last 10 seconds. The new queue is a good place to look to decide if creating subcategories would be a good idea, most submissions don't seem that great and giving them air time would be more inclusive, but would it be for the better?
Also for me personally I enjoy that HN is just one big list of submissions centred around one goal ("Anything that good hackers would find interesting") it means it's easy enough to discover new fields of interest I'd never have thought to search out, whereas on reddit discovering new fields of interest is much more difficult.