Regardless of everything, I always start by clicking the comments link on front page, and I end up reading either the comments or comments + article.

Often I read the comments first. Sometimes you can glance over the comments and if all the comments say "it's not like this" I will probably skip the article.

Also there's surprisingly huge amount of knowledge and anecdotes in the comments, and often they have higher information density.

Unfortunately each day I click 3x more links on HN than I have time to read through, so I don't always end up reading the article (which ends up in an ever-growing to-read list)