To be clear, I think this opinion demonstrates such a completely bullshit, narrow, entitled, and ethnocentric view of the world it blows my mind. It's a helpful reminder of why I don't live up there.
Unrelated to this, I wonder if people are outraged at the people who move to ND to pursue the oil boom over there. There relatively medium skilled and unskilled workers can earn more per year than SV 'tech' workers. Are people also showing the same contempt and or jealousy (or whatever it is) for those workers who decided they would partake in the energy industry boom in North Dakota? Or are tech workers a special kind of evil manifestation of things gone wrong? If so, what exempts the ND blue collar workers from this outrage at people's earning power?
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In both cases I pretty much see supply and demand at work. If suddenly everyone sought a CS degree (and then saw a devaluation in the degree, kind of like EE degrees in the 80s/90s), then salaries would slump. Same for the energy boom workers.
That said, I still think the comment fails. "haves and have nots" is only arguably hyperbolic because it's cliche, but ignoring cliche connotations it's just plain dryly accurate because the discussion is effectively about a resource: Money.
paul_f's proposed hyperbole makes a jump from "has money" to "has a work ethic", which is what I find wildly invalid and offensive. Even ignoring opportunity and circumstance for a moment (which I put aside so that I can avoid getting into a Randian snowball fight), it still ignores the existence of two people with equal opportunity and circumstance, but unequal tendency/desire to optimize for income.
If that is so, then it doesn't come across that way.
I'm not sure what the perception is towards the ND oil boom workers, but to get a sense of how the protesters perceive the tech community, take a look at the Fake Google employee that was at the protests: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/12/fake-google-emp...
It's a caricature for sure, but it sounds a lot like the comment at the top of Hacker News right now.
Well you can safely unblow your mind. He used a stereotype broadly applied to a group, but lazy people do indeed make up some portion of the "have nots". Sibling comments show measured, thought-massaged responses that correct the GP.
Let's not combat bad generalizations with hyperbole.
There's a good book on this: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. Well worth a read.
There are no easy answers here, though being mindful of history is important in arguing this topic - predisposition and environment have historically been used by social darwinists to assert superiority over other cultures and races (see: "tropical climates breed laziness" and "blacks are predisposed to lesser intelligence but greater physical ability"). They're not verboten, but it pays to tread carefully if you want to argue in that direction.
Spoiler: GG&S ends up arguing that the answer to why some countries are more productive than others is historical geographical circumstance, particularly because of access to large grains and domesticate-able animals which propelled some early cultures into agriculture and the rest is history.
The question of why Africa was largely technologically undeveloped was of some importance to Europeans during the slave trade. The predispositional argument was made to justify the practice of slavery, and post-slavery to justify continued discrimination.
Similarly, if you go to East Asia today (see: Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong) you will still see today continued mistreatment of Southeast Asian migrant workers under the guise of predispositional and environment inferiority ("tropical climates breed simple minds" and such nonsense), justified by macro-scale outcomes ("look at all the tropical countries, all of them are a mess, clearly non-tropical climates breed harder workers").
These attitudes are depressingly common. The macro-scale differences in countries is often used as justification for odd micro-scale beliefs.
I don't think the GP deserves a measured response. I think the comment deserves outrage, but I get your point. I certainly get hyperbolic.