If you are lucky, for every technical subject discussed on Hacker News, you will find at least one expert commenting in the discussion. Here the issue with the pristine weather is directly linked to the difficulty of making LIDAR works under the rain something I remember someone knowledgeable with LIDAR posting very early here.
Sadly my feeling is that during the past few years these posts have been becoming rarer and are less upvoted that they used to be. Controversial or very assertive comments seem to have more success. I fear that Hacker News is slowly turning into Reddit.