There does seem to be a bias towards overly worded critical comments.
> Much of what looks like rudeness in hacker circles is not intended to give offence. Rather, it's the product of the direct, cut-through-the-bullshit communications style that is natural to people who are more concerned about solving problems than making others feel warm and fuzzy
It's not quite the same, but it comes from the same cut-through-the-bullshit attitude.
Possibly, but there are a couple more factors.
1) In the general population, criticism is still the norm. The default reaction to any change is neutral to negative. If any response is made, chances are it will be negative.
2) On HN, vacuous responses are discouraged. And since substantive positive responses are hard to make (most of the positive spin usually ends up in the article, not in responses), positive responses in general are uncommon. Comparatively, substantive negative responses are easier to make, not least because it's almost always easier to see a problem than to see a solution.
Either one of those would push the responses towards negative criticism. Combined with yours, you now have three not-insignificant forces. There are probably more. There probably aren't many forces pushing towards positive response, and demonstrably not enough to balance the scales.
Or we're all cynical assholes. Just possibly.
Unlikely. HNers are wide-eyed Utopians in the Platonic fashion of believing in virtue through central planning. There is no cynicism here to be found, but in the downvoted comments.
1) Yay! 2) Here's where they could have done more...
With all due respect to ESR, and speaking as an autistic person who has struggled with socialization, I get tired of people trying to paint their failure to grasp basic social principles as a virtue. Behaving like an efficient robot is useful when dealing with machines, but other people are not machines and treating them as such does not improve productivity even if you think it ought to.
A couple of jobs back, I met with a supervisor to proudly tell him that a gigantic, exhausting project I'd been working on for the last nine months was finally ready to deploy. His response, almost verbatim, was "Cool. Here's what I need you to do next..." I found it nearly impossible to care about what he wanted for the rest of my time there. 60 seconds' worth of interest and congratulations would have gotten dozens of hours of extra productivity out of me.
Sorry, that got awfully off-topic. It's just a hot button with me.
60 seconds' worth of interest and congratulations would have gotten dozens of hours of extra productivity out of me.
Hundreds, probably, thousands maybe. It's hard to overestimate the value in these things.
Except, of course, on HN.
So, to reiterate, other people are not machines.
If you never know what success looks like, you're always failing.