It's not a "slam piece," it's an email from a listserv, send two months ago. Someone realized it'd be catnip for people on HN and posted it.

Many people upvote things not necessarily because they agree with them, but rather to bump it in hopes that someone with good insights will chime in in the comments section.

This especially applies to potentially controversial things.

Yeah. I'm not qualified to judge the quality of an instruction set, but this writer destroyed all credibility with me by claiming that an undergraduate could design a better architecture (than this enormous collective effort) in a term. It's right up there with claiming you could create Spotify in a weekend or whatever.

I think the reason is that it ultimately encourages deep and thoughtful conversation. If nothing controversial was ever proposed, the motivation for participating and "proving others wrong" is lessened. It might not be the healthiest way, but I certainly find myself putting a lot more thought into my comments if its a contrary point or in some broader controversial context.

Overall, I feel HN is most fun when a lot of people are in disagreement but also operating in good faith.

Good question. The answer is that HN is community driven and that what ends up on it reflects on the qualities of its diverse readership.

But I agree that this bit of writing comes across as a bit overly assertive and arrogant; and probably trivially proved wrong by actually running some benchmarks.

By the same reasoning, the Apple M1 would obviously be slower than anything Intel and AMD produce given similar energy and transistor density constraints (i.e. same class of hardware). Except that obviously isn't the case and we have the Macbook air with the M1 more than holding up against much more expensive Intel/AMD chips. Reason: chips don't actually work like this person seems to assume. The whole article is a sandcastle of bad assumptions leading up to an arrogantly worded & wrong conclusion.

I want to see what people say against it.

if for no other reason than to quickly formulate counterarguments. Next time at some meeting or other get together, if someone pipes up with an anti-RISC comment, most people won't be able to quickly refute it. But having had this discussion here, we're inocculated and able to respond with intelligence and experience.