I can understand the confusion and your point. Paul graham is PG and his posts are always rocketed to the top. But, you can always check the profile (which I do often to get a better perspective on people).

Checking someone's profile is great because you can see their post discussions and comments to see if they're genuinely an ass or if they're geniuses you can learn from all of their other comments.

There's nuggets of gold in comments. It took me a year after I started reading HN before I really learned to value the profile and comments function.