The headline is very TCish. Arrington has never said anything I've seen that fits the headline. It takes a lot of misconstruing to get to that headline...
He called out the twitter (Rails) guy by name. I've been involved in the industry since dotcom times and that was the first time I've seen a single engineer been singled out for media ridicule. The scenario was like a junkie lashing out at his dealer for denying him his fix.
Just because he called out a single guy who was unable to make something scale doesn't mean he was dismissing the entire technology (as, clearly, he hasn't).
Actually, I know Arrington was interested in Rails as early as July 2006. We had a serious conversation about using it for the first version of the job board. I argued for PHP and we settled on it -- at the time, Rails deployment was a PITA and he didn't have any other Rails apps, so why take on that hassle for a simple app?
Yeesh, I keep mentioning I build that job board here. It only took ten days from introduction to done, he just keeps coming up here.
come to think of it, he probably suggested this headline. This is a double winner for TC and Snaptalent -- exposure for both of them! TC to the hacker crowd, and more traffic for snap talent.
I think the negative TC articles get blown way out of proportion--I'm generally surprised by how positive and free of tough judgment the coverage on TC is. People often point out how positive they are to YC companies, but if you do the math, they're positive to almost all small companies. Bigger companies catch plenty of flack--but that's OK, they can take it.
If you add'em all up, though, TC is a pretty resoundingly positive site--it's snarky (in a TMZ kinda way), but it's generally good-natured ribbing of the sort that takes place all the time at events in the valley. Just tonight, a bunch of folks were hanging out at Bistro 412 in Palo Alto making fun of the Web 2.0 "business model", venture capitalists, and anything else that came up. Doesn't mean everybody who was there doesn't like the industry or the people in it.