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Comment by singular | Hacker News Reader

"I have for a while thought of you as (total honesty here) a bullying cock"

Notice the past tense. I based that opinion on the many aggressive attacking posts by Zed (for which he is well-known), particularly the attack of Mark Pilgrim (now deleted.)

That impression may be right or it may be wrong, but for good or for bad it's one that I got, and I felt my not mentioning that or hedging it here would be intellectually dishonest.

Note what I said next:-

"but this comment which is sincere, genuine and offered to someone for whom this could be greatly helpful has made me seriously reconsider. Kudos."

Which I really meant sincerely. It was actually meant to be a genuine compliment, but it is really hard to put that across without sounding sarcastic. Ah well.

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Again, rewriting history. I attacked Mark only after he refused to fix his book, despite my offer of help, and told me to go fuck myself. He'd also attacked many other people in an exactly similar way before I did. I mean, c'mon, all I did was replicate this post Mark did:

http://web.archive.org/web/20070418001022/http://diveintomar...

I didn't see you calling Mark a cock after he wrote that. And, let's not forget that when Mark did take his gear off the internet I was sympathetic and told people to not "kick a man when he's down", something I'm damn sure he wouldn't do for me.

So if you're bringing out Mark Pilgrim as your shining example of people I "bullied" you pretty much picked about the worst example ever. Mark was a dick who shit on quite a few people in his day and deserved a little bit in return. Thinking that he was some choirboy that I beat up is a very naive way to view the world, but that's what I expect from someone who builds up mythical opinions of people they've never met.

Anyway, closing this tab now. I've sent out about 60 emails helping people find work and will be looking at about 10 resumes tomorrow in the time it took you to write these little comments. You rock dude!

I don't think it's rewriting history to say you were aggressive and attacking, I do absolutely accept that you might have been 100% in the right and justified in that.

I got the impression you were being bullying - my whole point here is that I felt I was wrong, and your kindness made me reconsider.

My little comments (indeed they are little, I make no claims otherwise) were actually genuinely and seriously meant to be complimentary while being open and direct about the impression I had.

Actually, please do ignore me and carry on helping people. These kind of arguments are a waste of time, what you're doing to help these people isn't. I admire it.

singular, don't worry, your post was fine. The self-confessed asshole (Peddling Luck vimeo - 34:30) overreacted due to a self-appointed discussion thread-relative moral high-ground.

"Fuck that book...fuck that bad advice, those people are lying... he/she is full of shit" etc etc. That was my first introduction to the Zed, just 5 min ago.

Then, singular comes along and says "I once thought you were a cock, but not anymore, kudos", and that gets a rage-reply from the Joker? Well, that's funny. People are hilarious!

By the way, someone has released an open-source Job Board project, maybe interesting to mention in this context: https://github.com/acapilleri/job_board

There's a difference in the two phrases: I love you, but you're fucking stupid. You're fucking stupid, but I love you.

I prefer the former to the latter. Sweeten me up then crush me with reality. A lot of people see the latter and just absolutely stop reading after "You're fucking stupid", especially people with admittedly short attention spans.

That would be the only thing I would apologize for or alter, personally. I understood the sincerity immediately but this is because I come from a long line of men that have taken the latter approach and I have to willfully ignore the negative because I know some positive exists or they wouldn't bother saying a damned word.

The point is that you stand in judgement of Zed.

Just because you now have a positive judgement doesn't change the fact that a few hours ago you judged him to be 'a cock'.

Why shouldn't he be pissed about that, and why should he care what you think?

Hmm, I don't think "I have for a while thought" is past tense. I'm going with 'present perfect.'

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