<p>I'm not going to defend the overall hostility of the comments, which <a href="http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/76123/top-users-answer-victim-of-reddit-mob-behavior/76262#76262">Hans has already apologized for</a>, but one thing bears mentioning, and that is that <strong>several people here seem to have thoroughly misunderstood the meaning of one his comments.</strong></p>

<p>People, please, if you don't know what an idiom means, <a href="http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/pay+the+piper" rel="nofollow">look it up</a> instead of guessing:</p>

<blockquote>
  <h2>pay the piper</h2>
  
  <p>to accept the unpleasant results of something you have done | pay the price<br>
  <em>After fooling around for most of the semester, now he has to pay the piper and study over vacation</em></p>
</blockquote>

<p>There is no way, no how, that he actually meant "accept my answer" by "pay the piper".  It just doesn't make idiomatic sense.  And considering that the top-voted answer in this question thread uses <em>precisely</em> such an interpretation, it's indicative of the fact that <em>several</em> people got the wrong idea.</p>

<p>It's plain as day to me what he <em>actually</em> meant.  The comment meant, <em>"If you insist on doing this the wrong way (using <code>DoEvents</code> to mimic an asynchronous task) then you have to deal with the negative consequences (requiring extra code to stop the task or else having the application hang).</em>  That's it.  And speaking as a Winforms developer of... many years, I can attest to that being completely, 100% correct.</p>

<p>Again, I'm not defending the overall tone of those comments or the answer itself, but the assumption people seem to be making here - that he was demanding his answer be accepted before he would offer any more help - is <em>completely</em> and <em>unequivocally <strong>wrong</strong>.</em></p>

<p>Pretty sure that a lot of the reddit folks weren't familiar with the expression either and downvoted on the same wild and false assumption.</p>