No it isn’t. Your perception of him is warped because you read the Hotz Haters Digest on HN and elsewhere. Go read his blog posts and you might learn a thing or two about what he’s really like. Go watch his interviews on YouTube. He may not be the most impressionable individual (nerds rarely are, even Carmack is criticized for being robotic sometimes). He’s opinionated and he likes to say provocative things for the interviewers to throw them off guard and not be so monotone, but that doesn’t make him a person worthy of being scorned in every thread on HN. He’s far more capable and far more nuanced than people give him credit for. It’s just shitty watching this community eat people who brought it up to what it is today (referring to hackers and crackers alike).