The more I look at it, the more I think what happened in the comments below is a remarkable example of cross-cultural communication. Not all of the communication was very high quality, of course, but that was to be expected under the circumstances.

I'd guess that the author is no longer checking the thread, because it's so rare for one of these threads to spark back up again after several days. I doubt that he was overwhelmed, because he was responding openly to criticism earlier, and it would surely be an interesting learning experience.

p.s. Your posts in the thread were very good: thoughtful and substantive, which is what we're looking for here. I hope you'll stick around HN long enough to see if it satisfies your intellectual curiosity. That's the purpose of the site: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.