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Comment by krick | Hacker News Reader

Seriously? Some guy brags about how he wasted a whole day arguing with some rude dude, who randomly emailed him, because he didn't want to read his essays as he was too busy? I guess I'm much more disgusted by Jeff, than by that Alan. I mean, even if I would do something like that, there's no way I would be so proud of myself to make a blogpost about it.

I'm honestly surprised 40 people in 2 hours found it worthy of HN frontpage.

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He's a writer. He used this situation to write an essay examining the literary industry. Like all good writing, there are many valuable things which could be taken from his (well executed) writing. Personally, I found some interesting parallels in how the venture capital industry works, and it helped me to conceptialize how those concepts extent into other fields.

It was written as a blog post because we were the true audience, not Alan.

Examining the literary industry? I thought he was plugging his friends' books.

successful then, i take it?

Personally, I upvoted it because I think it very succinctly highlights the importance of community in a lot of disciplines.

Alan wants to bypass all the long-term give-and-take investment in the writing community and somehow still become well-respected and famous within that same community. I think we've all come across those types.

So this is a general treatise on how to deal with people we don't understand? Through a mocking, pandering tone, while reminding those who were not fortunate enough to to simply fall into friendship with me that other people have interesting lies?

Alan has problems, but Jeff is a dick.

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