To be fair I just trawled through that thread and found your posts most obsessive, and Zed seemingly sticking to technical discussion with (for him) not all that much profanity. Now, not that I disagree with your assertions (epoll/poll overhead << actual I/O processing) but I don't know why there was so much traffic on this. I don't know zed of course but I used to follow him before the term follow was owned by social media. Trying weird/apparently-pointless shit like measuring how polling scales is Zed's thing. Trying it for the goal of making the absolute fastest http server seems positively sane.

So it seems a bit weird that somebody posts zed's adventure to HN and then suddenly he has to defend this experiment like it's a billion dollar company.

Perhaps I've missed the egregious thing you were referring to in that thread, but many of his responses to your (numerous!) replies asked for specific stats behind your assertions, and I think it's telling for our industry that you had none (I also have none, yet believe I'll never have to care), which for a person trying to write a fast server by deliberately doing things differently, you can see why he wouldn't be so quick to drop the question and defer to your unsolicited wisdom.

That's a great example of Zed going all macho and abusive when confronted with carefully reasoned criticism. Others have been pointed out in this thread.