&gt; <i>Classic hacker news comment. &quot;I must disagree with whatever the post says and declare that no rational person could disagree with my criticism.&quot;</i><p>That is even more of a &quot;classic hacker news comment&quot;, in the bad sense, than the one you&#x27;re objecting to. I&#x27;ve noticed that generalizations about HN in arguments always degrade the quality of the discussion. The trouble is that community members (on all sides of any divide) tend to extrapolate whatever they notice and dislike into an image of the community as a whole, which then resembles the image of their adversaries. This is bad for the community, especially because we have no face-to-face contact to mitigate it.<p>I don&#x27;t mean to pick on your comment in particular. It&#x27;s a pattern that comes up a lot when commenters diss the community.<p>We detached this subthread from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10887769" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10887769</a> and marked it off-topic.