Their question could be confused by others as it's phrased. "my methods" includes both the VPNs I tested, and how I tested them. They correctly observe that I withheld all information about my methods, rather than only the component I intended to.

Someone else who didn't realize that I'd left out the methodology could possibly interpret their question as confused/misplaced/etc. I definitely wondered about that at first, but I took the good faith approach:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

Because we are not owed anything by HN commenters. Floatingatoll posted what they wanted to post, and they have no responsibility to post anything more than that.

If you or I think there should be recommendations of which specific VPNs properly route Mac app traffic, then you or I can do our own tests and post our own comments with those results and recommendations.

Well, no, I felt earlier when I posted this that I owed a "steps to reproduce my results" explanation. It got lost and I'm glad they called that out.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25118136

I'm definitely frustrated that so many people (in top-level comments on HN, especially) are taking for granted some random Internet post without verifying it, but that's no excuse for the missing methodology.