This is a great comment for perspective. I rarely comment on anything. The reason is that HN is full of folks who spend all day posting about issues that they've yet to contribute even something small, let alone something of significance in the topic area they pretend to be an "expert".

I'll share a personal example. I've not been a fan of your approach to RSS in the past. I was especially frustrated when developing a parser and having a fragmented landscape because of RSS 2.0, and other developers lack of understanding that your blog didn't represent a standards body. However, I never publicly complained about it because I understand why it happened, so I just shut my mouth and get back to making my parser work. At the time, even now, publicly complaining about your contributions would be incredibly disrespectful to your body of work.

The only way I would ever be in any position of criticism is if I had a similar body of work to compare. I didn't then, and I sure don't now, so I just respectfully keep my mouth shut and work on what I can contribute.