With respect to point #2. This is an interesting one for me. My career started where I was a software engineer for a TV company. Most of my product managers an

With respect to point #2. This is an interesting one for me. My career started where I was a software engineer for a TV company. Most of my product managers and business managers were non-technical and generally I got to skate a lot on "feel". "I don't like it - it seems hinky" was actually a viable disagreement for a technical issue. My job after that was an a heavy engineering company - basically 100 engineers and maybe 10 non-technical staff. There I had to defend everything rigorously. I didn't like that much but frankly it made me a much better and thoughtful engineer I no longer could float on feel and had to be able to defend my positions. HN is much more like that second job, with the karma attached you can't just throw out a random "I think..." and expect it not to be challenged. I'm not saying it necessarily better, there's frequently times when I'd just like to make a joke and not have to worry about my karma score getting battered. But thats the way it tends to be in highly technical and intelligent communities.