There are many opportunities to apply the Principle of Charity here. For example, that statement about populations can easily be interpreted to mean simply that great programmers can be born anywhere. That's pretty unobjectionable. (Imagine the kerfuffle if he had claimed anything but that.) And does the literal number "95%" substantively change the argument that there are many great programmers outside the U.S. and that U.S. is ill served by startups not being able to hire them? No it does not. Therefore, by the Principle of Charity, that is not the point we should focus on.

My interest in this thread is not about immigration. It's about how far too many Hacker News comments are uncharitable (in this specialized sense) and how that seems to go along with ill-spiritedness. It's time we all stepped up our game.