mhill
For the first comment, it's pretty well-known that C#/VB.Net is way faster than PHP/Python/Ruby in raw performance. Benchmarks after benchmarks have shown that fact. Often it's just a matter of bringing it up as a reference in discussion. I don't want to prepare a benchmark for every statement I made.
I've seen plenty of opinionated single liners got plenty of upvotes, admittedly those stated the popular views, so single liner is not a good reason for downvote. But nevertheless I'm not into a popular contest. If HN can't tolerate diverge view/opinion, that's its loss.
In one post about shebang (#) being used in Facebook and Twitter, the discussion was about crawling Ajax pages. I asked a question on good practices to make a Ajax site crawler friendly. It got downvotes! I was truly puzzled. The question was purely technical, non-controversial, within the topic, and extending the discussion. Yet, there were people (long timers with downvote power) trying to discourage it. They were acting exactly like toxic as you described.
In another post about Joel's statement of SO being more scalable than Digg, people were giving this and that explanation but ignoring the obvious elephant in the room - .Net was faster PHP. I made that statement and got downvoted to oblivion. Of course people here hate Microsoft, are into dynamic-type languages, and prefer open-source but a technical fact is still a fact. This just shows how narrow-minded people here are who can't tolerate diverge approaches to problems.
Oh well, if they want it to be a toxic playground, they get it.
Amazing. There are downvotes on your comment. This just shows what kind of community this is.
The unpleasant thing is that people expect to be hand-fed their daily dose of intellectual stimulant, and got upset if the dosage is off. I've seen comments like, "Your submission/post/blog are lame. It's very annoying it wastes my time." WTF?! The guy spent lots of time writing a blog and asked for feedback. If it's not up to your level, just move on, no point in bashing the guy on wasting your time just because you don't find it stimulating.
What is more disheartening is the upvotes for those kinds of comments. It's really a turn-off.
Are invisible urls (for archor urls) still frown upon by Google?
BTW, I did got bit by O(nlgn) vs O(n^2) issue, despite computers being fast nowaday. Once I used bubble sort in a cache system. It was quick and simple. Things work fine for small size cache but slowed down substantially when size > 10,000; n^2 => 100,000,000 ops. Switching to heap sort did solve the problem. So yes, understanding algorithmic complexity does help in real life work.
However, 99% of development are run of the mill coding.
It would be more interesting you have facts to refute my statement than downvotes.