From a consumer standpoint, that is the more interesting metric.

For those of us who frequent HN, it is only half the picture.

Or like 9/10 the picture

Upload is useful in case you're on a connection with severely worse upload than download. Say 10mb down and 384k up.

How much uplink do you need to send enough ACK packets for a HD stream?

You're right, uplink is pretty much useless if you're only consuming Netflix. I guess I'm still infected by 90s-era ideals about the internet being a place for the free exchange of information, where any tech-savvy person should be able to run their own server, etc, etc. I'd at least like to be able to upload photos of my son without my connection slowing to a crawl.