On one hand, Hacker News, despite being one of the best of its kind, is a programming community, and programming communities (or similarly populated communities: online gaming, etc.) are possibly the most overwhelmingly negative and vitriolic I find online. (Huge exception: StackExchange.) I find it perplexing that the business & finance communities I visit are consistently more civil and constructive. Remember the developer who got flamed for creating (not promoting or arguing the superiority of, merely posting on GitHub) an sed/awk replacement? Our community is an overwhelmingly mean one at times.
(You can dress it up as engineers/developers/hackers being more honest, more blunt, less MBA-y, whatever. It's unpleasant and hurts people's feelings.)
On the other hand, in the midst of all the ad hominem of yesterday's discussion (you can find it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5738455) there was a lot of valid commentary which Dave Winer (whom, for the record, I have never talked to nor do I know his accomplishments) seemed to ignore. The reasonable extrapolation from My One Talk with Marissa Mayer was that Winer felt she was an individual whom did not respect developers' viewpoints or a more 'balanced' view of the web. Specifically, he says:
All this is to say that the promises execs make on acquisitions are meaningless. They own the thing, they will do what they want to with it. It doesn't matter how many nice sounds Mayer makes on the deal. At the core she cares not one bit what the users of Tumblr think. She's saying what she needs to say to make the deal happen. To avoid a PR crisis on Day One. To make the team at Tumblr feel like their work has value to the new owners. That somehow this acquisition isn't actually an acquisition.
And I think it's entirely valid to say that, hey, isn't it a massive logical leap to get here from the anecdote of the 'BlogThis!" button?
Winer seems to be asking Hacker News to be polite, which I think is important: but I think it's better that Hacker News is good, and along the way it seems obvious that being polite is better than not being impolite.