wait, he's upset cause something got posted to HN? why is he upset with Paul?
That's like someone getting the shits with Gutenberg because a newspaper printed something.
Dear Paul
31–40 of 184 posts
Re: Dear Paul
#32> Would I have to cost you millions before you decided it wasn’t worth it to run a shitty 1990s forum site just to listen to a bunch of grown men complain about another grown man’s choice of hobby while they jerk their tiny puds at fake tits MILF porn?
Funny that this is a sentence in a paragraph titled "So Mature, Right?".
Re: Dear Paul
#33Good example of a Streisand effect.[1] The red flag in this post is that it doesn't discuss concrete specifics, just claims "slander" and victimhood as if it's a given, then takes that all the way to "Paul Graham has created a great big slander and abuse platform." As far as I can see this the "retraction" he's referring to: "Zed Shaw will not kill your company. For a very poor choice of words, I apologize sincerely.…
I tried to find the video, which used to be hosted at http://www.viddler.com/explore/rentzsch/videos/31/ but has been taken down.
If I may believe the quotes, he called Zed Shaw, djb, deRaadt etc all brilliant developers with terrible views on security.
Since most developers out there have a terrible view on security, the takeaway is that Thomas actually gave a compliment by naming Zed Shaw in the same breath as DJB and deRaadt, and that Zed Shaw is very sensitive to criticism.
Re: Dear Paul
#34This post is a prime example of why you should take a deep breath, count to ten, and make sure you really want to post that long rant in a public place online.
Re: Dear Paul
#35The core point of this (people are jerks, especially on HN) has been a recurring theme ever since the new mods have showed up on HN, trying to clean up our act. Things seem a lot better than a year ago, and I try extremely hard to assume good faith from people on the other side of the screen when replying to comments (helps my mood a lot). But this suffers from the same thing everything I read from Shaw: such strong…
Rather than satire, it comes across as rage.
That's certainly how you can tell his feelings were hurt significantly. The extremism of his language, and his need to lash out, tells you the extent to which he feels wounded.
Re: Dear Paul
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah... you'll find people being jerks everywhere. Most often, you'll find people being jerks without knowing they're being jerks. But if it happens to you , then the source is "the cesspool of the internet". I hope Zed knows he's being hyperbolic here, otherwise he's got another thing coming.
"..he's got another thing coming." I am curious about what you think this means?
this has come to mean "they should think again"
Re: Dear Paul
#37Do people really think HN's denizens are abusive? I remember usenet from the mid-nineties. It was really, really bad. People would routinely post very graphic messages about killing other people (and worse), and sometimes there'd be personally-identifiable information posted (like physical addresses), and all manner of other intensely awful stuff would happen. This was usually restricted to certain groups, but due to the nature of "cross-posting", it would often spread all over the place - in fact, people would quite often randomly add "nice" groups into a massive flamewar just to cause trouble.
Sometimes the police would be involved, too, but they never did anything - from what I can remember - because usenet didn't have real-life celebrities on it (apart from a few sci-fi and fantasy authors) and was fairly incomprehensible in comparison with, say, Twitter or Facebook. Also, teenagers didn't commit suicide very often from it so I suppose it was hard to turn it into a political issue.
But, Usenet also had some really great discussion on it, and with a good news client (like slrn) was vastly better than any web forum anyone has ever come up with since... and with a suitably powerful client, you could actually filter out a lot of the abuse too.
Against all of that, anyway, HN seems incredibly tame to me.
Re: Dear Paul
#38I've read HN almost every day for the last 7 years. In that seven years, I don't recall ever reading a post that said something particularly slanderous about Zed. I have seen post after post about his Learning XXX the hard way, and, in fact, I've even purchased at least one as a result. The one thing different about HN is that if you even slightly start to get overly negative on a post, you are downvoted into oblivio…
I bought a (paper, hardback) copy of Learn Python the Hard Way as a result of seeing a post about the book on this forum. Nice pedagogy, nice template, font a bit small but I have reading glasses.
Re: Dear Paul
#39ossreality, FYI you're hellbanned. All of your comments are dead.
Re: Dear Paul
#40wait, he's upset cause something got posted to HN? why is he upset with Paul? That's like someone getting the shits with Gutenberg because a newspaper printed something.
It's more like being mad at the owner of a particular newspaper for allowing/turning a blind eye to/actively encouraging certain kinds of content to be printed in said newspaper.
Your analogy would fit if Zed was directing his post at the creator of the "online forum" in general.