giles_bowkett

like most people who post here you need to read Paul Graham's early work. professionalism is harmful to quality of work and especially so in startups. professionalism is an artifact of the industrial revolution and is not relevant in all fields. computer programming is to some degree post-industrial and professionalism is irrelevant and archaic for many programmers. criticizing a programmer for being unprofessional is like criticizing him or her for not being well acquainted with the phases of the moon and the effect those phases have on that programmer's crops.

If people didn't like Techcrunch, they wouldn't go to the site. If Techcrunch was irrelevant, they wouldn't generate massive leads for pet projects that people create.

these points are both true, but they don't alter the fact that Techcrunch is also full of shit.

html fail arrrgh

<i>TechCrunch is awful, but there's no excuse for the spit in the face incident.</i>

that's silly. I swallowed some water but there was a fly in the water somehow, it was wriggling, so I reflexively spat and your face just happened to be there. that's just one of many great excuses for spitting in somebody's face.

more seriously, there might or might not be any excuse for it, but if you thought it was anything but a matter of time, that's unrealistic. the appropriate response is just blogging that they're full of shit, but inappropriate responses still fit in an overall system of cause and effect.

there you have it in a nutshell

why the hell would the judges die with a hard-on? that doesn't even make sense.

that's interesting but why is it on hacker news? what has it got to do with anything hacker newsy?

thank you! to get posting rights on Y Combinator, you should have to answer a quiz, and there should be questions about this Shirky post on it. this and the one about micropayments. I can't believe some idiot got on the Daily Show and the front cover of Time without reading Shirky.

API

ok, you know how all my posts about Hacker News being doomed rocket to the top spot on the site?

and this question isn't even on the front page?

THAT is why Hacker News is doomed.

if the people reading Hacker News WERE ACTUALLY HACKERS they would have already demanded an API, and this would be the number one topic of discussion. real hackers are more interested in getting an API than discussing why or why not their site is or is not doomed.

my blog posts on blah blah blah Hacker News is doomed SHOULD NOT be less interesting to hackers than a question about getting an API.

doomed, doomed, doomed.

or, to put it another way, why not an API?

can we get an API?

No matter how small you try to make it, it's always there. If you try to make it smaller you'll just push part of it below your conscious perception. Then it's a big freaking iceberg destroying things and you don't even know.

Better to disengage your identity. Use your imagination to adopt other people's identities. Experience and consider things from within those identities.

I wouldn't mind a link to my blog but I never fill out profiles in any level of detail beyond that.

I posted on casual encounters that I wanted to meet a chick to get busy in a Burger King bathroom because I love that Humpty Hump song and got a bunch of responses. Some included naked pictures. The only thing I put in my ad was a Burger King logo and a picture of Humpty Hump. True story.

Yes it's wonderful to leverage community but the way to get hired is A) find people who are hiring; B) develop skills which are in demand, and/or advertize that you have them; or C) do something interesting that makes hiring people find you.

Looking for work by putting an asterisk next to your name when you post on Hacker News is like saying that your job search consists of watching television.

If you read Hacker News and you have free time, why on earth are you not building some kind of business? Pick some tiny problem and build a tiny, awesome solution. Do some consulting. I gotta tell you, if I were coming here looking for people to hire, it wouldn't be the people who have no hustle and expect jobs to fall out of the sky and land in their lap.

this belongs on Reddit, not Hacker News.

hate to say I told you so. :-p

Python Paradox. You whippersnappers need to read Paul Graham's best stuff!

you know when the Christians bail, they say, "professionally, we are fucking OVER."

who didn't see this coming? it all goes tribal. all of it. read "here comes everybody" and "snow crash."

orange name == massive design flaw

google "clay shirky micropayments", kids.

design flaw.

I totally disagree with this. First of all, Joel is an idiot. I think this is fact. I think we all know this, and those of us who don't know yet will find out sooner or later.

More importantly, this whole "how to disagree" thing is about extending courtesy. Joel Spolsky dissing Kent Beck is like a four-year-old piddling on a real pioneer's foot. Beck did Spolsky more courtesy than Spolsky deserved just by responding at all.

A lot of people on the Internet don't seem to realize that when one person disrupts another's day with attacks or what have you, that other person might have other things going on that are more important to them than responding to the Internet crap, or which require so much time that no time remains for responding to Internet crap.

The subtext in "How To Disagree" is "you have to show me respect if you want to debate something with me." That's perfectly reasonable. But starting a fight with somebody out of the blue isn't about rational, adult disagreement.

Besides, dude, he's responding to something somebody said. It's not his fault you know about it. He didn't publicize it to you, and for you to judge him based on his failure to provide you with context, when it's you going to his site, that makes no sense at all. Be mad at Hacker News for linking to something you don't know about, or be mad at yourself for clicking links automatically and wasting your own time. I mean there's no logic in holding that against Beck at all.

design flaw.

http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-ope...

hate to carp on it, nobody likes hearing I told you so, but a design flaw is a design flaw.

woah, this karma thing is worse than I thought. downmodding my opinion, I hope you all die.

anyway, for what it's worth, because I'm thinking out loud, the thing w/both Arrington and Sierra is it's live by the sword, die by the sword. especially with Arrington. you can't set up a system where your income depends on fame and then be surprised by the fact that people project things onto you. that's what fame is. it's not the only thing fame is, but it's a huge part of what fame is. there's a whole lot of people who don't need to know who Arrington is, but know who he is anyway. Arrington created that deliberately, because building your fame builds your ad revenue.

interesting thing about neurology, if you hear about a celebrity often enough, you actually end up with a neuron dedicated to that specific individual. so he literally invaded our brains because it would make him money. that's fine; wasting our time for his selfish purposes isn't a problem in his book. but when it bites him in the ass, it's not fine?

I'm not saying this is how fame should work, but it's how fame does work, and if he's not realistic about that, that's nobody's problem but his. you can't help yourself to all the upsides of fame and then literally go running home to Mommy (as he himself says he did) when the downsides enter the picture. that's just not going to work.

and people call me a troll. :-p

casual sex is awesome. although it does get old. but even then it's awesome. I'd rather have casual sex than a meaningful cheeseburger.

here's the fucked up thing about Arrington. I'm not surprised this happened to him; I think everybody should pay attention to the fact that this happened; and I think it will happen again, because when he speculated about the spitter, he assumed it was some entrepreneur. it never occurred to the guy that anybody but a slighted entrepreneur would want to spit on him, when in reality many more people do. but that's not the fucked up thing. the fucked up thing is that with all of that information, I was AFRAID to post my opinion about this, because what if Arrington discovers who I work for and takes revenge by ignoring our products. think about how fucked up that is. the guy doesn't know very much. his posts often have huge technical inaccuracies and other bad information. and I'm scared to OFFEND him in a random comment on Hacker News, because he might retaliate for me expressing my honest opinion, and my company might get fucked because of his whims. so he has all this influence, and pretty much every time he discusses tech that I know details of, he gets shit wrong. that's what's fucked up about Arrington. I guarantee you there are people reading this whose opinions on the subject we will never know. and that's probably why he got spat in the face. somebody who could normally have just said what was on their mind didn't have that option, got wound up all tight, and went a little bit crazy.

but Kathy Sierra, some misogynists went a little bit crazy. we can't tolerate this kind of thing, no matter how much this particular target deserved it, because it creates a dangerous atmosphere. so although I think anybody who is upset that this happened is a fucking idiot, and anybody who was surprised is probably too stupid to spell their own name, we need a way to prevent this kind of thing from happening, and part of it involves tuning out idiots like Arrington instead of letting them amass all this ridiculous inappropriate influence in the tech world.

"kill yourself" is hardly a nice thing to say, under any conditions.

I think this is awesome and terrible at the same time. Awesome because I wanted to do it myself, and you knew it was only just a matter of time. Terrible because even though Arrington deserved it, Kathy Sierra didn't. Attacking people because you disagree with them, that's a really awful trend.

For Arrington to be surprised that this happened, though, jesus. That's ridiculous. Go to my blog and google "Arrington." Got at least five links to him spitting in people's faces online. Probably many more than five. And that's not even going anywhere near the politics, power-playing, manipulation, or his claim that promoting his own companies means "journalism is evolving." He's a horrible human being.

I'm against the idea of randomly attacking bloggers, but if you had to pick a blogger to randomly attack, you couldn't find somebody who deserved it more. And if this incident shuts down TechCrunch, we should find the spitter and give him a medal for helping the tech community scrape that thing off our shoes.