[mnemonicsloth]

I know there is a very strong anti-academic current here on HN...

You know. Really? How? What's the basis for your claim?

I confess I'm having a hard time giving you the benefit of the doubt here.

Three of YCombinator's founders have PhD's from Harvard. A number of other users are graduate students, professors, or researchers in industry, and I've never noticed any animus toward them. A significant fraction of the submissions to this site deal with new research, and generally cast it in a positive light. Doesn't all this suggest HN would be more than ordinarily sympathetic to academics, not less?