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Comment by lkey | Hacker News Reader

Its an attack an Jarred's public, (un)professional behaviour. One most of us in the community have born witness too in recent months.

"Jarred, in his professional capacity, drove away many from our community, and we'd prefer to disassociate." is not 'Jarred is a bad person, privately'.

Now, in these circles, that might as well be the same thing, given how little personal life I imagine most VCs have left outside of work. But that's not really Andrew's problem.

I won't defend Andrew's style; I think he could mask some his neurodivergence more when communicating to a wider neurotypical audience. But it's his project, his community is certainly aware, and this too, is a known quantity.

It might help you though, to reread the piece with the assumption that Andrew is being completely sincere, without adding in a secondary subtext like, "Andrew is trying to assassinate Jarred's character".

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I think he’s being completely sincere in this attempt to assassinate this person’s character. I say this as someone who before this day regarded Kelley as a role model. Now I see him in the same category as a Musk like character. Don’t blame “unmasked neurodivergence” for this, plenty of neurodivergent people can communicate effectively and professionally to a wide audience without attacking someone’s professional character.

For example, given the number of claims made here there’s very little actual evidence and support. Kelley says Jared is a bad manager and credits rumors. He says he writes slop code and doesn’t provide a single example or prove that statement. If this were his “neurodivergence” coming through I’d expect more thorough argument and less “stinky manager” grade school insults.

>> I think he's being completely sincere in this attempt to assassinate this person's character.

So that's a no, you won't make the attempt to engage with it with any other frame of mind?

>> Now I see him in the same category as a Musk like character.

Do you not see this as an overreaction? Andrew writes one (perhaps overly) blunt article about someone who publicly attempts to tarnish his project's reputation and you view it the same as the worst living human?

> you won't make the attempt to engage with it with any other frame of mind?

I told you, I engaged with it with the frame of mind that the author is a role model to me. My conclusion having read the words was that this was an intentional snipe.

People are calling this honest, but I consider it deeply dishonest to make the litany of personal attacks that he did while trying to pretend "I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred".

Either Andrew isn't being honest with his audience, or he's not honest with himself. We can leave that as the most charitable framing. Either way it's just not true.

> you view it the same as the worst living human

I didn't say that. I only make the comparison in that they are both emotionally driven to say rude and mean things when they feel attacked.

> He says he writes slop code and doesn’t provide a single example or prove that statement.

You can look at the bun codebase. Moving fast has its drawbacks, and bun moved very fast. It’s not what I’d call idiomatic or exemplary Zig.

I think this is what Andrew was highlighting with “beginner energy”. Not knowing you shouldn’t rewrite a toolchain and take on an entire ecosystem can be a positive. I think this is pretty common in business, where someone/something isn’t “great” but wins because they didn’t know any better and went headfirst into something experts avoided because they understand the challenges and what “doing it right” entails.

I think if one is going to call someone else's code slop, it's up to one to a) define the term because it's meaningless and b) to actually give at least one example. Not idiomatic or exemplary is one thing, but as I understand it, slop means that no care was put into creating it.

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