What would constructive feedback look like in this case? Padding the comment with something like "While I understand that the author put a lot of work into these essays..." would merely lower the signal to noise ratio. The way I see it, HN commenters who don't mince words are merely doing the same as HN's founder, Paul Graham. To quote from his talk "Great Hackers" (http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html):
"I didn't mean to make the book controversial. I was trying to make it efficient. I didn't want to waste people's time telling them things they already knew. It's more efficient just to give them the diffs. But I suppose that's bound to yield an alarming book."
Also, comments that amount to "I like this" can be compressed to an upvote. So we don't see many of those.
"I didn't mean to make the book controversial. I was trying to make it efficient. I didn't want to waste people's time telling them things they already knew. It's more efficient just to give them the diffs. But I suppose that's bound to yield an alarming book."
Also, comments that amount to "I like this" can be compressed to an upvote. So we don't see many of those.