Hacker News is depressing

Exactly.

Otherwise, include a license with your work, state that it is copyrighted, and still expect people to say whatever they want about you or it... Or, put it on your own private network, known as Not-The-Internet.

Did you read the thread the OP is responding to? The top comment is a personal insult that doesn't respond to the content posted and basically says "the feature you had a meeting with Google about is unimportant, so get over it" [1].

The comment itself is completely in contrary to the relentlessly critical attitude that believes every detail is important.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5738455

"I do think the meanness of programming communities is a the biggest problem we have."

It depends. I generally try to be reasonably civil online, but I also think there are valid reasons to be less so. A good example is when people are giving advice to newcomers that has a good chance of putting them in imminent danger. E.g. someone goes to an online mushroom identification forum and posts a picture of some random mushroom they found and asks if it's edible, and someone else replies with something along the lines of, "Don't worry, anything you find in your back yard is edible," especially when the mushroom in question is a destroying angel or something. You see similar things happening all the time, with medical advice or otherwise.

Another less extreme example is when people know they're wrong, but they keep repeating whatever they're wrong about because they're being intellectually dishonest to promote whatever agenda they have. A good example of this is my comment the other day on the 'class of 2013: you've been scammed' story, where I tell the guy and his editors he's wrong but he still doesn't correct the article:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5728788

In these cases a lot of times I find that I correct someone once, but then they actually try to use my civility against me in one way or another, so sooner or later you kind of have to drop the hammer.

If someone is wrong about something because they're just unaware of some fact then by all means be civil. But sometimes there can be underlying issues that are fairly toxic and in order to preserve the community you need to find some sort of way to quash them, whether that's through a technological solution or through some form of social condemnation. In the real world when someone commits a crime like rape we generally don't just gently tell them it was wrong, because we accept that civility is a tool that allows reasonable people to have productive conversations, but at some point people forfeit their right to civility if they're being blatantly unreasonable. The same should apply online.

Paul Graham's opinion matters inasmuch as Winer is appealing to Graham's authority to insulate him from criticism that makes him uncomfortable.

I think people are talking about multiple phenomena here. Yeah, there's the whole blunt/direct/borderline asshole behavior when someone is making a mistake and someone else is trying to correct that mistake in the most efficient way possible, hopefully educating the person making the mistake and maybe being a jerk about it to highlight for everyone what a huge mistake it is so everyone else remembers not to do that thing.

That's what the Linus defenders are usually standing up for, at least. Maybe in his case it's an effective way to run his project, I don't know. He's the boss and it's up to his contributors whether or not they want to deal with that kind of thing.

I don't think that's the phenomenon that's being discussed here though. You say it's refreshing to be told when your ideas suck by someone who knows better, but in my experience that's not the case in most programming communities. Most of the time, the people who are going to tell you that you that your ideas suck are not actually that much more experienced and may not even have better ideas.

When I first got on Usenet in the early '90s, I was just starting to learn programming. I thought the people on comp.lang.c and elsewhere were just the smartest people in the world (some of them were, of course). I loved it when they skewered people asking dumb questions or proposing dumb ideas, and I felt like I learned a lot from reading their posts. In hindsight, they only seemed to be so smart because I knew so little. Looking back on it now, many of them just seem like bitter and pedantic people that knew a lot of technical minutiae but didn't necessarily know or care about creating software that actually did things, that other people could use. They were smart and knew a lot of useful things, but just as often they would make very personal and subjective observations about things, but mask those observations as bold, objective proclamations about This Is How Software Should Be Written. Unfortunately, in my larval hacker stage I couldn't tell the difference.

Anyway, what I was getting at was that it's good to learn things from people who know more than you do, but just because they're assholes about it doesn't mean they're right (it frequently means the opposite). Programming communities tend to be dominated by the assholes though, because they're the most motivated post comments and get into arguments with people about technical minutiae. It's the way it is, but it's not necessarily a good thing.