I think it is generally a bad idea for any entrepreneur to read things that Ted writes because if you surround yourself with the kind of blind negativity he perpetuates, you probably won't ever build anything interesting out of fear of attack. For all the YC folks here, develop thick skin and ignore shit like this.

Ignoring all the anti-FriendFeed comments, which are ironic on many levels, we didn't build Tornado to optimize requests/second. That is just something the community has focused on post-launch. We built it to handle large numbers of standing connections for FriendFeed's real-time features. That is an area that is hardly as well-developed or solved, and I am happy we contributed some useful code given how many people are becoming interested in the space.