> He could or should have replied with less attitude and more facts, though.

I can see his frustration: ignorance frequently has the loudest voice - especially on The Internet.

* "TCP is good enough for Minecraft, it's good enough for you." Blissfully ignores the numerous networking-related bugs that have been present in Minecraft for years.

* "Premature optimization is the root of all evil." Blissfully ignores the remainder of Knuth's quote.

* "UDP is too complex, you won't get it right." Blissfully ignores any and all challenges, never improving their ability.

* "Internet is fast enough." No, it isn't.[1]

* Learns any or all of the above from someone else and believes it because it requires less effort.

Here's someone who has been putting out top-notch content on how to solve the hard problems out of nothing else but for the common good: educating people on how to make games. What do people do? Challenge those facts with superstition and unbelievable ignorance. He's got all reasons to be frustrated, I didn't even write those beautiful articles and I'm frustrated.

He's been putting in so much effort and when people blissfully ignore it, yeah, it's going to be frustrating.

Let him have his rant - at least he's not throwing the towel in. Everyone has their bad days.

[1]: http://www.statista.com/statistics/381388/asia-average-inter...

His articles are excellent, and I've learned a lot from them myself. But I cannot sympathise with lowering the level of a technical discussion to personal insults.

I would be wary about parsing any text below the words "RANT MODE ON" all caps in bold as technical discussion.

I don't know if this is a general failing of people's critical thinking abilities, a sloppiness in their reading, or something else, but I have noticed over the past (feels like) few years a growing problem:

A lot of folks conflate personal insults ("you, ggambetta, are clearly a dunderhead when it comes to reading comments") with general sentiments about a group or abstract population ("Hacker News posters tend to be overly sensitive to the point of being crybabies").

A great deal of the flavor and comedy in writing, especially pieces that are self-identified rants, are not from personal insults but instead from hyperbolic and sometime vitriolic statements about an abstract other.

Spot on and this was firmly written with tongue in cheek! It's funny because it's true though. I harbor no ill will to anyone. Also, a nice ending to this whole thing, the original poster found the article, and halfway through reading it, realized it was about them and posted a comment!

On the other hand, I really love those personal insults. They get the point across. Maybe there's something wrong with me?

there's a difference between being angry at people and insulting them. he was definitely pissed off, but he didn't insult anyone.

I can't sympathize with a technical discussion Mandarin. Lucky it is a big internet with lots of blogs.

An explanation for a behavior is not an excuse for it. Likewise my synpathy for the frustrations that led to someone else's behavior don't make the behavior right.

Which specific behavior concerns you?

My only real complaint is that he's addressing a particular person here. In his shoes I would have anonymized the source of the text and maybe blended material from a few different people. I'd rather the individual didn't accidentally recognize their words.

Other than that, I think I'm ok with people making exasperated rants. For those of us who actually understand the topic or have experience of teaching, I think a rant like this can at least be funny, and often can be cathartic. One shouldn't howl at the noobs, but howling at the moon seems fine by me.

I think it's also helpful for novices to see the occasional bile-dump like this. The question comes across to me as kinda lazy. The querent never really took the time to understand the core technologies and instead just spent a few months implementing broken stuff. But rather than think it through, he just waves away an expert answer as "kind of silly". A piece like this can help novices see how frustrating and self-defeating that kind of laziness is. I know I've benefited from seeing others get roasted for mistakes I could well have made.

There's nothing wrong with his behavior. He's an adult, and he can speak candidly. He needs no permission to rant or use foul language.

Does nickpsecurity's breakdown of the reason for the rant help you to understand its appropriateness?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10212003

Please take the time to read and digest nickpsecurity's comment in its entirety before forming an opinion about it.

Indeed, it is wrong for a novice to ask a professional how he accomplished his work, and then call the answer "silly" without any evidence or reasoning in support.