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Comment by zedshaw | Hacker News Reader

I personally have no idea why this stuff hits this site that often. Take this for instance: It is a half-finished manuscript that I announced in a tweet to people who follow me on twitter and asked for it. Already at the top of this set of comments is a dickhead saying he's such a bad ass 'cause he's changed "half a million lines of C code" and he thinks I'm not writing the book correctly because I'm being too low level. He gets all of this from three exercises and three paragraphs in the introduction.

Frankly, I consider hackernews kind of irritating and not useful as a promotional tool. It amounts to about 5% of my traffic for 1 day at best, and I only have to be here because if I'm not answering the petty little idiots who troll here then the rumors spread through my professional circles.

In other words: I could live without this kind of promotion, so it's definitely not "self-promotion".

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You're the dick Zed. The guy (hp) barely mentioned what you were doing at all and was just offering some general advice on C. You take it like a personal attack on your manhood.

You're always defending yourself against dreamed up conspiracies. You have a serious martyr complex.

Sure he's a dick, but you know he's a dick.

Why is it that every comment I read by you is either you whining about being treated unfairly or you attacking someone who supposedly "attacked" you? Are you honestly that insecure? Do you read every comment as though it is in some way attempting to degrade your image?

Here you denigrate the HN community, saying it doesn't generate a significant amount of traffic for your site or whatever, and then go on to say you won't respond to the petty "idiots". I see. You're too "professional" for that. Obviously HN is so meaningless to you that you needn't bother with it. Yet you're here, commenting, making an ass out of yourself.

Woe is poor Zed Shaw; always the victim.

A quick look through Zed's comment history tells me that the % of posts he has made that could fit your description is roughly 1%.

So Im going to go with you having a selection bias.

OTOH I do appreciate your vigorous defense of the HN community, too many people just dont care about implied insults to their self identified tribal group.

Go llambda!

You're probably right. I've only seen a couple of his recent comments in threads related to his projects or site (and that thread about the GitHub community). So I no doubt have a selection bias; I suppose it's worth noting his reputation proceeds him, deserved or otherwise.

Nonetheless it's disheartening to see self-proclaimed "professionals" (I use this term loosely for while a person may be employed professionally this is not a guarantee a given individual will behave professionally: they are distinct things) who are well known throughout the community, behave like trolls. And even more so when they decide it's appropriate to take a shit on this community.

Well I will always try my best to preserve what I value. It's in my nature I guess. So thank you. :)

heh. His reputation appears to be a many faceted thing.

I, for instance, have been genuinely impressed with his productivity and his output, his choice of projects and his code and am moved by that aspect of myself that values quality to think very highly of him.

You, on the other hand, appear to feel that the most important aspect of his output is the way he achieves the standards that you have set for him - judged by how he expresses himself towards those who he feels are being disrespectful or rude at him on the internet.

Just out of interest, do you believe that making a strongly negative personal judgment based on a 'fact' that is clearly incorrect and could be easily checked with just a few clicks is the act of a professional? do you meet your own high standards?

First I will call out your blatant fallacy: tu quoque. Now let's review things:

I readily admit I'm a hypocrite. But also note, I don't claim nor ever claimed to be a professional; I'm not. I'm not at the helm of projects that are useful to and used by many people. I haven't written books on the topic of computer science. Nor have I given talks or do I run a website that receives a large volume of traffic. Maybe that qualifies [him] as working in the domain of a professional, yes?

Although he may have achieved great things, this doesn't give him a license to troll HN and it doesn't excuse him of baseless personal attacks. The comments he made that I replied to were no less than that, at best. At worst, they were insight into his character. Certainly we can hope the latter is not true. Nonetheless, there's no place for that kind of bullshit; it's inexcusable, I don't care who you are. I made such a judgement because he clearly attacked the user "hp" who had done nothing more than make an observation about texts that introduce C in general. Zed's reaction was puerile, irrational, and even paranoid. I hope you aren't standing up for such behavior?

"Maybe that qualifies [him] as working in the domain of a professional, yes?"

Either you think he is a professional, or you do not. You appear to be holding up a standard, claiming that you believe he fits the criteria needed to be judged by it, and then lambasting him for not living up to the standard you have set. Overall, I find this somewhat confusing, but possibly I dont have sufficient context to judge.

TBH Im not particularly motivated to 'stand up' for the behavior of anyone I dont know.

I am interested in what makes you so interested in casting judgment on Zed, as opposed to on yourself?

Whatever puerile, irrational and paranoid responses Zed may have produced, you seem to be matching them with a self admitted hypocrisy, a large amount of self righteous vitriol and a bewildering statement of tribal affiliation to an anonymous internet discussion forum that apparently requires your outraged protection lest it collapses completely under the weight of a misunderstanding between Zed and another participant.

Zed has, to my knowledge, done you no harm of any kind. He certainly represents absolutely no realistic threat to HN.

why do you feel justified abusing him in this fashion?

tu quoque. [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

dude, I heard you before.

It doesn't apply in this case. I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to discern why.

Zed Shaw, the Kurt Cobain of programming.

hey, I was just idly chattering about C and the way people in general often approach it. Not intended to be a review of an unwritten book or imply that you plan to approach it in any particular way.

I am a bad ass of course. But I thought it was relevant to the comment that I've written a lot of C.

When your second sentence is: "Play me a tiny violin ;-)" it isn't just idly chattering. It comes across as extremely petty and derogatory.

When somebody directs "derogatory" remarks at themselves, it's called "self-deprecating". It's a good thing in many Western cultures at least, and demonstrates a degree of modesty. In this case, hp made it clear that he doesn't expect sympathy (or applause or whatever) for having written a lot of C. It's just something he mentioned because he thought it was relevant.

It is relevant - people not long out of school and talking at length about everything that's wrong with XYZ are tedious both to experts and experienced people generally. hp's comments on C use experience, clear reasoning, and absolutely no personal commentary whatsoever. This contrasts with the negative, personal and poorly reasoned attacks of people such as you.

I hope for your sake that you're asserting someone is "extremely" petty based on a mere self-deprecating aside because you're only a few years out of school and haven't learnt to communicate yet, and not just an old hand trapped an inability to relate to people with different opinions or role models. The world can always do with more talent and fewer martyrs.

"When somebody directs 'derogatory' remarks at themselves, it's called 'self-deprecating'... In this case, hp made it clear that he doesn't expect sympathy (or applause or whatever) for having written a lot of C. It's just something he mentioned because he thought it was relevant."

This isn't the only possible interpretation of that comment. Sometimes words can have more than one meaning, and misinterpretation isn't always a sign of idiocy or acting in bad faith

Also, when you say, "This contrasts with the negative, personal and poorly reasoned attacks of people such as you," do you mean, "I hope for your sake that ... you're only a few years out of school and haven't learnt to communicate yet, and not just an old hand trapped an inability to relate to people with different opinions or role models"?

"This isn't the only possible interpretation of that comment"

Genuine curiosity... what other interpretation could there be? Is it an ESL issue with literal translation causing offense? Or is there another interpretation in a non North American culture?

In N.A. at least, this is an extremely common expression.

By "that comment", I meant hp's original comment, which was a long tangent on how to go about teaching C, in the context of a post about a draft of a book teaching C. The piece that X-Istence isolated contributes to the interpretation that the comment was a criticism of Shaw, and not just a long tangent. It can be read as setting a confrontational tone.

I don't understand why other commenters feel it was unreasonable of Shaw to interpret it as a criticism.

I think it's been on the order of a year since I last heard this particular violin phrase. It might be common in your community, but that's not exactly North America, yeah?

  I don't understand why other commenters feel it was 
  unreasonable of Shaw to interpret it as a criticism.

To speak for myself: because the other interpretation makes much more sense, if you take into account that people are generally trying to be nice and helpful.

I was reading that comment, thought "hmmm, that criticism sounds a bit premature and more based on what others have written than on what Zed is writing... oh wait, that's because he isn't saying anything about Zed's writing at all. Yeah, now it makes perfect sense."

So admittedly, you get confused for a moment, but then there's a perfectly obvious solution: he's not commenting on the linked article, but is offering advice in the form of criticism on what generally goes wrong with these projects. If you don't see that solution and don't go for that interpretation, I think it means you fail to consider the option that someone is just being clumsy at being helpful. So it's another instance of Hanlon's razor: don't attribute to malice what could equally well be explained by stupidity (which is of course much too strong a term for an awkwardly phrased anwer).

BTW, it's not right that your comments are being downvoted.

Yes, I agree that Shaw didn't apply Hanlon's razor here, and ought to have.

> I personally have no idea why this stuff hits this site that often.

May I clue you in? You create interesting quality projects like Mongrel, Mongrel2, Tir, and LPTHW. You are also entertaining.

If that's self-promotion, let's have more of it.

I’m saddened by the number of grown men I meet who worship guys like the persona found in this rant. Too frequently men (especially younger men) will by default listen to whoever “talks tough” rather than the people who make the most reasoned arguments. They will listen to blow hards and pundits all day and blindly follow their “leadership” on fad after fad, never really questioning whether these people are worth listening to in the first place.

-- Zed Shaw, backpedaling when his angry schtick gets called out by the community

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