How do you use HN effectively to get the most out of it?

- Our industry moves very fast, so HN is good for keeping tabs on it.

- I want to help people out, so I regularly visit https://news.ycombinator.com/asknew to see what people are struggling with (this is a bit meta since here I am doing that right now)

- /newest is a rabbithole I visit when I'm bored. I've unearthed many nuggets of gold over the years from that section.

- I like healthy discourse about various subjects and love reading people's take on a topic. People on HN come from all walks of life, and hearing strange or unusual takes on a subject regularly surprises me

I browse and comment normally but the higher order feature you're asking about is search.

I'm constantly adding "hacker news" to my google search to get conversations on HN about the topic I'm interested in.

It's a great jumping off point for so many types of projects or questions.

Arguing in the comments (respectfully of course), contradict people, let people contradict you, correct people, let people correct you etc. You grow from it.