Comments are ranked based on the number of upvotes they receive and when they were posted. This unfortunately means that the first comments posted have a tendency to receive upvotes and down out all others even if they are completely wrong. HN could alleviate that effect by rewarding more recently posted comments more. After all, if an article takes 30 minutes to read, the comments posted in the first 30 minutes are probably not very useful.
I've noticed that HN tries to fight this by putting new comments at the top for some users, in order to see if a particular comment would garner upvotes if it were also posted earlier.
Just because a post (on HN) is new, doesn't mean the linked article is new.
And especially for mid to high profile court cases, there are likely hundreds to thousands of people that will read the opinion before a reporter is able to get to the first news story about it pushed.
