Exactly what I'm talking about, Zed. You like pretending that you're capable of instantly judging people, and once you do you sink your teeth in and never let go.

So I'm writing a blog in college where I pretty openly write whatever I feel like, on impulse, with a big warning saying I write whatever words come to mind and that I frequently write things without thinking them through. One of those things was some speculation about the social niche of the programmer, which somebody saw fit to submit to HN. (Curiously, just this week there was a conversation about that, and I was able to contribute some much-matured thoughts.) I protested against the submission - it was written at 4 AM and I made no attempt to claim it was anything good - but because it's HN and I love most of the community, I figured I'd engage the people commenting about it, not because I have a holier-than-thou complex like you but because I like arguing with people when I suspect I'm being stupid. That's how I learn.

Of course, that's not all that was happening with my life. I wrote that in the middle of some stressful school stuff, my personal life was in the middle of a nasty crunch, and I happened to be in a place I utterly hated. That meant I had a very bleak, nasty mindset, and that expressed itself in my writing.

But you jumped on the comment I made and latched on, formed a summary, and you refuse to let go. Even then, when I came back from my 6AM class to see your rant and apologized for writing a half-garbled, drowsy comment, you thought the best procedure would be to go about insulting the kid who'd just told you he'd said something stupid. I didn't instantly drop out of the conversation because I figured you might have something interesting to say. You didn't. You bitched and moaned and then tweeted a shitstorm telling all the people they agreed with me that you thought they were terrible people.

So yeah, Zed. That was disillusioning. I'd seen you as a guy whose Ruby bitching was a breath of fresh air in the community, and that your gripes were legitimate. After you posted what you did, I had to seriously reconsider your past attitude, and I concluded what I just posted today, namely that for all your intelligence you've got some emotional issues that leak into a lot of your work. Sometimes I see what you're working on and I really dig it, because you're doing it to solve a problem that needs solving. Other times I read something of yours and it comes across as self-inflated and pissy. Not that I hold that against you - I still keep a secondary blog to bitch and moan into so that it doesn't leak into my main writing - but in this particular case, I thought my viewpoint on your _why rant would contribute to the conversation.

And you sure as hell haven't earned enough street cred to have any kind of opinion on the matter.

I've been a major participant in online conversations for six years. I read a shitstorm and I write a shitstorm. I interned with a major company on the merits of what I was writing back when I was seventeen. My current blog is four months old and I get 15,000 unique visitors every month. No, I'm not Ruby-famous for writing an overlong bitchfest, but I think that what I did is even more impressive, considering I like to switch between writing about modernist poetry and GTD and the occasional short fiction piece. 15,000 people a month think that I'm interesting despite the lack of niche. And in my capacity as an amateur theme designer (emphasis on amateur), I field dozens of emails a week about my work, fix bugs, and just yesterday was asked for the first time about doing some commissioned work, without once seeking any out actively.

I suggest next time you just shut your stupid mouth about me and other real hackers. You're a wannabe. When you got some real code under your belt, then you can come back and play with the big boys.

Dude, I'm a writer. I don't program. My passions involve essay writing, screenwriting, playwriting, poetry, fiction, forum posts... You get it? My chops are my writing. I do a bunch of other things on the side, but if you're asking for work I've done, I can give you a few hundred thousand words of polished work. As I've said before, even on this thread, that's what drew me to _why. I know nothing about his programming skills, although the products of his I used worked and he made programming more appealing to me than anybody else ever has, but his musical and writing output thrills me.

Until then, keep playing the flute or uh writing screen plays or founding companies or whatever other insignificant little events your life needs to define your personality to other people but not to yourself.

You kind of have these masculinity issues, like when you tweeted that if _why had been a black belt like you maybe he wouldn't have felt the need to quit the community. You say "keep playing the flute" like it's a bad thing.

But I didn't mention flutes or screen plays or companies here. I mentioned you. You kind of ignore that and go about insulting me. As a matter of fact, I haven't mentioned flute playing online for a year or so, because I haven't done anything interesting with it whatsoever. I put screenplays online and when I do a few hundred people read through it. I occasionally find that they've quoted my words online, so I guess my writing reached somebody.

But at the end of the day, you're the 30-year-old who gets so worked up over legitimate criticism that you call college kids names. Goes to show being a programmer doesn't instantly make you a man, amirite? Pathetic.