Sadly, most of the things on there are true. We can try to deny it all we want, but most of the stuff that's there is true. The power of anonymity is that you get to voice honest opinions without tying it up with your identity and/or feeling responsible for it. Of course, this can be argued otherwise too, by citing some (bad) comments as example from that thread, but for the most part, what you see there are honest comments.

Some of my favorites:

>Why [popular technology] is [unexpected opinion]

>Why I have decided to stop using [ Tried and true web dev environment] and start using Meteor

>Why [obscure framework] is the next [industry standard framework].

>Ask HN: Why is nobody using [obscure niche technology from the 80s]?

>[Actually interesting topic] - 0 comments

>Can the NSA blow up your PC remotely?

>Why you shouldn't store your files locally, but in the cloud

>Why it's impossible to use PHP even though millions of people are doing great things with it

>Some blog post about scalability... blog crashes after posting link to HN and /r/programming

>Show /hn/: I ripped off an existing product and added Bootstrap to it

>Pay me $50 to teach you decades old vim features in screencast form

>Reasons Why A Basic Income Guarantee Might Just Be A Bad Idea

And this is the best:

>38090087

so the password is password?

Internally, G+ is marketed as a unified login/account system. Management's stated reasoning goes something like:

  * It's silly to force users to have separate accounts for
    Google services because most users would prefer to have
    Gmail, Docs/Drive, YouTube, Calendar, and so on under the
    same account/identity.

  * Users who want to have separate public identities will
    create pseudonymous "Pages" for each of their identities.
    These pages will still be owned by the same account, so
    the user only has to log in once.

  * Users who are strongly opposed to a unified Google account
    are a sufficiently small population that it is acceptable
    to inconvenience them if doing so improves the experience
    of every other user.

By itself, these arguments are reasonable and could probably have been implemented without too much trouble (though "Pages" continues to be a confusing and unclear term). The problem is that the new account system was introduced at the exact same time as a social network, with the /same name/, and that the social network decided to inject a hard requirement of Facebook-style name validation rules into the new profile system.

Now the term "Google+" has become so strongly connected with the Google+ social network (and its infamous names policy) that any attempt to expand the Google+ account system is met with fear and outrage. I don't think upper management expected this or understands why the community reacted thus, just as they didn't expect or understand why requiring a Firstname Lastname format on the Internet was problematic.

I don't believe Google+ management is malicious, but they do seem woefully unaware of how internet-native communities behave.

Cool game! I just set http://www.asteroids.com to redirect to your app store page for the next couple weeks.

  [231 points] Show /hn/: I ripped off an existing product  
  and added Bootstrap to it.
 
  "[some program/service] in Javascript" - 6075 comments

  Why [obscure framework] is the next [industry
  standard framework].

  Hacker, entrepreneur, genius, lifestyle blogger, CEO of
  Whoof! Pastebin for dog owners and pixel.io image-resizing
  service made entirely in Go.

Startup culture in a nutshell.

I can see how HN is bad for the author's well being, but certainly not for mine. I don't feel bad about reading other people's success stories. I don't feel any need to switch languages/frameworks when reading about new/hyped stuff.

It's all just information, what you do with that is up to you.