Yes and no. I need to tone it down (or leave HN, wehich is probably better).
Other people need to improve things. But this is not going to happen. An alternative to doing something is to dismiss other people's work. That's what this guy did. 'Emacs is too slow' - emacs startup time doesn't bother me, even if it did it would be down in the noise amongst other emacs irritations (or other software, heck, the amount of time I've wasted on Git...)
He dissed emacs for no good reason, and dissed stallman who I really do respect (because RMS actually did something).
I've seen a lot of this kind of destructive behaviour and I'm so tired of it. I should just leave HN if I can't contribute properly.
Edit. If I post stuff like "x != y" I will say why, with timing, or clarify with In My Experience" or something. "emacs is slower" doesn't tell me by how much or discuss if startup time even matters, so it is a useless criticism; I can't act on it. It doesn't even feel like a good-faith comment.
I agree on the start up time point. I don't know how slow most people's experience is, and I don't use emacs, but I really can't imagine people aren't using emacs because of a few extra seconds it takes to open your code.
To your second, rather obnoxious point: when they said 'out of touch', they didn't mean 'hasn't been in communication'. They meant he doesn't understand the attitudes/motivations/requirements of the community.
