I believe interesting BTC news, hits HN front-page rather often and from my experience most readers/users are fairly familiar with BTC and understand the technical side (protocol) very well.
Most HNers, being programmers, don't understand the socio-economic aspects of BTC but that's because they don't understand currencies (generally speaking) or the reason of existence of some institutions (e.g. the FED isn't a scheme of the rich for domination of the world's population, which bitcoin will finally set free, to use a free currency, with no fees, hurray!!!).
Being logicians by necessity, I'd argue that most developers could debate the socio-economic implications of bitcoin or any other currency better than you would expect.
In fact, it is my experience that most good engineers can accurately debate many concepts with which they are unfamiliar.
Most HNers, being programmers, don't understand the socio-economic aspects of BTC but that's because they don't understand currencies (generally speaking) or the reason of existence of some institutions (e.g. the FED isn't a scheme of the rich for domination of the world's population, which bitcoin will finally set free, to use a free currency, with no fees, hurray!!!).