When Wales refers to 'negative people', you would hope that he is not against criticism itself, and is here complaining that Seth is just being negative for the sake of being negative. But if you are truly open to criticism, and the possibility that such criticism may be correct, then:

a) How do you know whether someone who is regularly critical of a project is just a 'negative person', or that the project has many faults?

b) Even if someone is just a 'negative person', why is this a bad thing? Criticisms from such people can still be valid, and therefore valuable, while invalid criticisms should be easy to bat away.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that while Wales will surely say that he welcomes criticism, he has a fairly low 'pain threshold', and sought to undermine Seth - a technology journalist with a column in The Guardian - by dismissing him as a 'negative person'.

Hah! Wales hasn't merely dismissed Finkelstein as a "negative person", he's called Seth "an idiot", directly!

Intelligence is truly defined when those who are using the time they could be correcting/improving their weaknesses versus touting about how stupid a user is...Finkelstein is practically giving them the answers to get better. why not just take it. I know this is a different direction than was listed above but I get tired of reading the low blows (not you seth)