Comment by demachina | Hacker News Reader

Comment by demachina | Hacker News Reader

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Please expand.

I quite carefully read your comment about anonymity and truth, which suddenly morphed in to anonymity and cowardice when I called you on it.

I appreciate maybe I bent your meaning a little when you said you are nice to people except when they say "personal and negative" things about you. I bent it partially based on reading your Twitter feed and blog for years and seeing how you actually deal with people there.

Quick question, do you think the stuff you said about Marissa Mayer might be considered "personal and negative" by some people? If so why is it OK for you to say personal and negative things about other people, but not vice versa.

I should apologize for generalizing. I am sure you are nice to a lot of people. A lot of people seem to have a very high regard for you. You may be very nice in real life, I have no way to gauge that.

The issue at hand here is are you nice, or at least civil, to people if they disagree with you, especially online? Judging by comments on HN, you seem to have really viscerally angered a lot of people over the years. Why do you think that is?

Maybe you just misunderstood. When I said I am nice to people who are nice to me, that doesn't mean they agree with me on everything or even most things.

I have a friend who is a Republican, and has many political views that I find abhorrent. However, he's an incredible thinker and doer when it comes to technology, and a great story-teller. I totally enjoy hanging out with him. I even like talking politics with him, and he seems like it too. Debating that kind of stuff with him is more about exercising my mind than emotions.

I am unusually interested in differing opinions, most people aren't. Some even think that if you disagree with them, that you are somehow disrespecting them, they take it personally. I am not one of those people.

So you've really got it wrong Mr or Ms DeMachina.

You might want to take a look at your process, because in this case it's yielded a very incorrect result. You could never debug a program the way you've tried to understand who I am.

About Marissa Mayer, I don't know her well enough to know how she takes criticism, and I have no idea how she felt about my piece. I got no response from her, nor did I expect one.

My purpose was to share some experiences I had with acquisitions, because that's what we, in the tech blogging world, were discussing that day. I wouldn't write that piece today or next week, unless there was a big buyout in an area that interested me.

I am a blogger. This is what bloggers do. If you don't like the way I blog, my guess that you probably don't like blogging much.

Anyway I don't try to be nice all the time in my blog posts, but I also dont' go out of my way to be not-nice. I really just want to explore stuff and share what I know.

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