Consider this on the "I keep finding closed and interesting questions on SO" - the "what is the best linter for PHP" or "What is your favorite cartoon" or "where is the best place to meet female programmers (for romance)" (ref http://i.stack.imgur.com/x9ik2.jpg ) - why not ask those questions _here_?

If the answer to that is "because that isn't a good place to ask those questions" or "because HN isn't set up for answering those types of questions" then consider the possible response of "maybe SO isn't set up for answering those types of questions well either?"

When there is more noise than signal in a question and answer page, it is useless. Go dig around https://community.oracle.com/community/java and consider why you don't put site:community.oracle.com in your search (or for that matter, see how well one can find the answer to an error message in /r/javahelp). When there are dozens of answers that consist of "try libXyz" it isn't useful - you're going to have to dig through each of those to see if it works or not for you... and you might as well have done a google search instead.

When the questions are "how do you make a triangle with '*'" a dozen times over in September, those questions need to be closed so they don't waste the time of people who are trying to find good questions to answer.