You've got to be kidding me. Almost all the responses here are positive and this forum is extremely politically correct. Just because there's an occasional bad apple shouldn't be an excuse for you to attack HN in general. Its unfair, overly critical, and frankly turns the bullying discussion into a meta-discussion about HN which is unhelpful.

As someone who's been on the receiving end of HN traffic, its a lot of eyeballs. Its one thing to write a personal blog posting for your 500 readers and whole other to find 500,000 hits that day.