In my experience having run a bunch of different sentiment models on HN comments, HN comments tend to place around neutral to slightly negative as a whole, even when I perceive the thread to be okay. However I've noticed a huge bump in negative sentiment on large HN threads. I generally find that absolute sentiment doesn't work in most corpuses because the model reflects its training set's sentiment labels. I generally find relative sentiment to be a lot more useful. I have yet to do a temporal sentiment analysis on HN but I have a suspicion that it's gotten more negative over time. I agree with another poster that I think HN needs to be careful to not become so negative that it just becomes an anger echo.
Relative sentiment on this site between topics is something I've done and the obvious results show. Crypto threads are by-and-large negative, most political and news related threads are also highly negative.