You're piling on too hard here. It's unfair of you to put things that crusso didn't say in quotation marks. That is guaranteed to produce a defensive reaction that makes the argument worse rather than better. And then you depict a caricature so idiotic, it's surely unfair.
You're correct of course that commenters are too quick to make gotcha criticisms when they ought to pause and realize that there's almost certainly more going on. But this is something most people do, and we should each take care of our own part of it first.
There's another aspect of this too. On HN, the problem is as much created by the upvoters as by the commenter. Sometimes a comment was intended as an offhand observation—the sort of thing you'd throw out to friends, not meant to sound authoritative, let alone pompous. But by the time it gets upvoted to the top comment, it can sound like the criticism of an asshole. HN unfortunately has a number of areas like this, where every individual contribution is positive, or at least well-intended, yet the total they add up to is negative. Let's not make the mistake of blaming individuals for a collective problem that we all contribute to.
You're correct of course that commenters are too quick to make gotcha criticisms when they ought to pause and realize that there's almost certainly more going on. But this is something most people do, and we should each take care of our own part of it first.
There's another aspect of this too. On HN, the problem is as much created by the upvoters as by the commenter. Sometimes a comment was intended as an offhand observation—the sort of thing you'd throw out to friends, not meant to sound authoritative, let alone pompous. But by the time it gets upvoted to the top comment, it can sound like the criticism of an asshole. HN unfortunately has a number of areas like this, where every individual contribution is positive, or at least well-intended, yet the total they add up to is negative. Let's not make the mistake of blaming individuals for a collective problem that we all contribute to.