I agree. But what if they made 300K/month off HN, would they be asking HN to upvote posts regardless of merit? The post seems to be a little sour grapey to me b

I agree. But what if they made 300K/month off HN, would they be asking HN to upvote posts regardless of merit? The post seems to be a little sour grapey to me but I don't think it's a big deal anyway. Just one more story to ignore on HN's front page. But I personally find their posts(and many others on HN) lacking in objectiveness and follow the below trend: 1) Find something (eg. sharpening pencils), that most companies/people do. 2) Write an article about how a policy of not doing that immensely helped their company. (save time not sharpening pencils and make a million bucks). "Sharpening Pencils Considered Harmful" 3) Make it sound absolute and generalize it(no company should do this and if they do, they're bureaucratic fools). This may not be explicitly stated, but it's implied. 4) Rake in page views Then it hits front page of HN(surprising how their posts get immediately on FP, but I don't think it's foul play, maybe it's their Twitter followers?). Then the inevitable follow up HN comments/blog posts come along "Why 37 Signals is wrong about Pencil Sharpening and how it can work/worked for me/us and we made millions Sharpening Pencils". Full of noise, flamebait comments, back and forth opinionated arguments and even personal attacks that are sometimes totally worthless since the whole argument is very subjective to individual circumstances. Navigating through this morass for finding the 1% of posts that are actually insightful is an exercise in frustration and usually a waste of time. The big risk is that you'll find a comment which you vehemently disagree with and fall prey to spending ten precious minutes composing a reply ("Look Mom! Somebody is wrong on the internet!") which will lead to a comment tree of arguments. For reference, look at this very discussion, it will be very similar to what I just stated. This is repeated ad nauseum on here, not just by 37 Signals but by many other posts. I've slowly learned to ignore the noise generated by this but not always successfully. It's like chewing gum for your brain except you can easily get sucked into a wasteful time sink.