Fair enough, I'll edit my comment to just call out my dislike of the term without making it personal about the author.

(for anyone seeing this later, my comment above was originally more of an attack on the author, which is what dang was rightly calling out.)

Then maybe take the whole post itself down?

I don't see any need. The thread is ok on the whole.

On HN, the onus is on commenters not to react to the bits they find most provocative. There's even a site guideline about that: "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I am referring to the post itself, not the thread, where the writer seems to be pretty sociopathic in his dismissal of the inner lives of others as NPCs.

That is truly insulting.

I don't think it makes sense to weight that one detail more than the entire rest of the article. It's better to drop the worst outlier, as the guidelines ask, and focus on the rest of the content.

There's another point too: it's easy to misinterpret what someone means by a single token like that. It may have an obvious meaning to you, but it isn't clear what the author had in mind. This isn't nearly enough information to justify an extreme conclusion like "sociopath", and when you jump to such a label, what you're doing is not so different than what you're complaining about in the OP.

I disagree with your second point, but your first one is compelling. I appreciate your patience with my moralizing!

I'll take the one out of two :)