I agree. I can never really get into IRC as there are always three condescending comments to every helpful one and it's like a high school clique with password protected rooms and inside jokes.
I also agree about HN, it seems to have managed to avoid a lot of that.
And then I was reminded why I stopped doing that a long time ago: there is so much snarkiness. None of these lists or IRC channels ever seem to take a stance against this behaviour and it seems to me as if there are often self-selecting groups of snarky "locals" who drive a list or IRC channel.
On the contrary, I do think that HN is fairly close to what he was describing and is the main reason why I've stopped frequenting other similar sites, but remained here.