FWIW, I didn't intend it as a personal attack in any way. The goal of my comment was to share some counter-intuitive personal wisdom.
The author's comment showed an uncommon lack of empathy for the other parties. Many people (me included) have seen that same quality in ourselves, and have found our own suffering to be a remedy to that.
When writing HN comments, I often struggle to find the right verbosity level. Perhaps in this case I didn't explain myself well enough.
@dang: Does this address your concern, or is even my clarified comment a problem? Just trying to make sure I'm clear on what you found objectionable.
I'm sure you didn't mean it that way, but "You need to suffer" is not something you can say on the internet without it coming across as a personal attack. Besides, it's guaranteed not to convince the other person, any more than smacking them for their own good would do.
When it comes to things like this, the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate their intent, and this needs to be done sufficiently well to obviate the default reactions. Previous explanations about that:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
If you had written something about your personal experience, like you started to do in this reply, that would have been much better. That's a much better thing to do generally!
