Jason Calacanis is a guy who runs a sweatshop building a website you've probably never been to and never will because you're a smart person who doesn't fall for spam.
He also has made a career out of being a professional asshole and making fun of "lifestyle businesses" that make products that people like and pay for. He thinks that if you're not a workaholic and want to enjoy your short time here on Earth then you shouldn't be working with startups.
We're hackers not journalists. If he feels Calacanis is scum he should be free to say so and not be held to some arbitrary standard of wiki-objectivity. It's certainly a lot more truthy than most of the horseshit that Calacanis drops around here whenever the subject of Mahalo comes up.
I think it's reprehensible that parent has been downvoted. Ad hominem is ad hominem, no matter how deserving we think the target might be. Great-grandparent poster asked a question, ostensibly seeking an informative answer. What they got was grand-parent's uninformative tirade. While it certainly represents how people feel about Calcanis, it does not in any way answer great-grandparent's question, it is not informative, and it undermines the norm of civil discourse that we should expect on HN.
Ad hominem is not a synonym for insult. It is used exclusively for when someone attacks the speaker, and not the speaker's arguments. In this case, there were no arguments. The question was "Who is X?" Someone answered who X is. That answer was harsh, but also consistent with everything that I have seen.
I agree its civility is borderline. But it's not an ad hominem attack because no argument was being made.
He also has made a career out of being a professional asshole and making fun of "lifestyle businesses" that make products that people like and pay for. He thinks that if you're not a workaholic and want to enjoy your short time here on Earth then you shouldn't be working with startups.