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This is a vapid personal attack on one person. This amounts to little more than gossip and mud-slinging and if the target were anyone but Paul Graham, it likely

This is a vapid personal attack on one person. This amounts to little more than gossip and mud-slinging and if the target were anyone but Paul Graham, it likely would have been flagged to death long ago. The irony is that the attention it gets here may end up accounting for the lion's share of exposure it gets. HN Guidelines say: When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." I guess if you choose your target carefully, you can get around that rule by writing an entire blog post that fails to make any kind of real and substantive argument with anything in particular and merely calls him an "idiot" at length. HN is no longer "turning into Reddit." Now it's turning into "People" magazine as long as the people you gossip about are tech people. If you think Paul Graham is "out of touch," maybe you can work on an app that helps rich people solve the problem of finding themselves surrounded by a sea of either yes men sucking up to them or haters. I imagine that sucks the oxygen out of their intellectual life for quite a lot of successful people.

neurotech1 6y ago
It's very telling that pg or other admins haven't flagged or removed this submission.
- tptacek 6y ago
  pg has nothing to do with HN anymore, and hasn't for many years. Dan doesn't kill things that are critical of pg or YC. (And DoreenMichele is quite wrong about this post; right or wrong, one thing it clearly is not is "vapid").
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    vapid: offering nothing that is stimulating or challenging. I'm failing to see this generate meaty discussion here. I am currently seeing mostly lots of flagged to death or grayed out comments, likely because it's basically gossip and mud slinging and not really anything more than "Some guy has a bee in his bonnet about Paul Graham for some reason." PS there's only one L in my name, not two.
    - tptacek 6y ago
      Among other things, it's a long and careful consideration of the different meanings of "brevity" in a programming language, and every paragraph is heavily cited. It clearly didn't speak to you, and that's fine, but you're wrong about it being vapid. (Fixed the name thing, sorry about that).
      - DoreenMichele 6y ago
        Then maybe you can do something to help course correct the conversation here other than being dismissive of me, like leave a top level comment that will help people here focus on the parts of it you personally find meaty instead of on the excessively obvious framing of "Waah, I am basically jealous of this man."
        tptacek 6y ago
        I didn't get "I am basically jealous of this man" from the article, like, at all.
        DoreenMichele 6y ago
        You have already made it abundantly clear that you disagree with me. Restating that you disagree with me adds nothing to this discussion. We already know you disagree with me. Your personal opinion and my personal opinion differing here is of no real importance to me. What does bother me is that this article is generating so many grayed out and downvoted comments because of the manner in which it was written. If you think there is something useful to be gained from the piece, you know a helluva lot more about programming than I do. You are in a much better position than I am to leave a top level comment that will help turn this pile of manure (by which I mean the comments on HN) into something thought provoking and interesting. I'm in no position to do that. My goal is to see better discussion here. As someone who has studied things like Social Psychology, I'm only qualified to comment on the defects in this and why it's generating such lousy comments. I'm not qualified to tell people where to look for some meat here and help them focus on that. You are.
billy_beef 6y ago
I fail to see how one article being posted signals the decline of this website into a gossip column
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  Of course, that assertion is hyperbole. The point being I don't think this really belongs here. I'm someone who finds social stuff very interesting. I mostly don't like gossip rags and a lot of psychological studies are essentially useless garbage. What value does this article really provide? Does it tell us where you can look out for Paul Graham's personal biases in order to get more value out of his writing? Does it propose better answers to anything in particular? This amounts to jealousy or something and it reminds me of an old comic strip where the punch line was to the effect of "After 12 straight hours online this woman is going You People Need To Get A Life!"
  - billy_beef 6y ago
    I have to disagree here. The article is criticizing his work, his history of participation in a field, and his current commentary on politics. Yes, it discusses him as a subject, but not as a piece of gossip and strung-together ad hominem's. It is definitely critical of him, but mostly in his capacity as a commentor and his history of being incorrect. It's not second-rate tabloid stuff because of what dimension of him it's mostly considering.
    - DoreenMichele 6y ago
      Racism, sexism, personal attacks in intellectual circles -- such things all tend to work more or less the same way. Attack them in a way that has plausible deniability and is socially acceptable for some reason. But if you look at the overall pattern of behavior, the real point is to attack or exclude a particular person or particular group of people. Among other things I've had a college class in Social Psychology. I object to a gossipy piece of garbage getting so many upvotes on HN while bringing down the quality of discussion here. If you find something meaty in his analysis of pg's work, then why don't you comment on that instead of arguing with me? If my comments here are so off the mark, why do they have so much attention? This piece is failing to generate meaty discussion. It's mostly generating hot takes about Paul Graham and not commentary on the criticism of his work because the framing of the piece doesn't really fit with the idea that it's about criticizing his work. If it were really about criticizing his work, what we should see here is debate about whether or not that criticism holds water. And I'm not really seeing that.
lkrubner 6y ago
I’m worried that I will either overestimate or underestimate how much you’ve followed the conversation regarding brevity and programming. If I’m saying something you already know, please disregard my comment. In other essays, Zach Tellman has made the point that Clojure is unique in that it’s syntax allows it’s written to form to almost exactly represent its AST tree. The comparison then is between Arc and Clojure and between Paul Graham and Rich Hickey. Both men wrote essays about programming which seemed to promise new ideas but Hickey delivered real innovations whereas we can now see that Graham was unable to deliver. And Graham’s failure is in part traceable to his inability to make explicit what he actually knows, or why he believes the things that he asserts. The debate over how to make tacit knowledge explicit is important. The debate over what constitutes good programming is important to the whole tech industry. I’m astonished that you would think this essay was merely a matter of gossip. It’s possible that Tellman should have repeated some of his earlier essays, to give more context to his remarks, but this is the Web, so he embedded hyperlinks to some of the previous discussions.
lkrubner 6y ago
“The irony is that the attention it gets here may end up accounting for the lion's share of exposure it gets.” Anything that Zach Tellman writes is going to get attention simply because Tellman has a following that takes him seriously.

neurotech1 6y ago

It's very telling that pg or other admins haven't flagged or removed this submission.

tptacek 6y ago
pg has nothing to do with HN anymore, and hasn't for many years. Dan doesn't kill things that are critical of pg or YC. (And DoreenMichele is quite wrong about this post; right or wrong, one thing it clearly is not is "vapid").
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  vapid: offering nothing that is stimulating or challenging. I'm failing to see this generate meaty discussion here. I am currently seeing mostly lots of flagged to death or grayed out comments, likely because it's basically gossip and mud slinging and not really anything more than "Some guy has a bee in his bonnet about Paul Graham for some reason." PS there's only one L in my name, not two.
  - tptacek 6y ago
    Among other things, it's a long and careful consideration of the different meanings of "brevity" in a programming language, and every paragraph is heavily cited. It clearly didn't speak to you, and that's fine, but you're wrong about it being vapid. (Fixed the name thing, sorry about that).
    - DoreenMichele 6y ago
      Then maybe you can do something to help course correct the conversation here other than being dismissive of me, like leave a top level comment that will help people here focus on the parts of it you personally find meaty instead of on the excessively obvious framing of "Waah, I am basically jealous of this man."
      - tptacek 6y ago
        I didn't get "I am basically jealous of this man" from the article, like, at all.
        DoreenMichele 6y ago
        You have already made it abundantly clear that you disagree with me. Restating that you disagree with me adds nothing to this discussion. We already know you disagree with me. Your personal opinion and my personal opinion differing here is of no real importance to me. What does bother me is that this article is generating so many grayed out and downvoted comments because of the manner in which it was written. If you think there is something useful to be gained from the piece, you know a helluva lot more about programming than I do. You are in a much better position than I am to leave a top level comment that will help turn this pile of manure (by which I mean the comments on HN) into something thought provoking and interesting. I'm in no position to do that. My goal is to see better discussion here. As someone who has studied things like Social Psychology, I'm only qualified to comment on the defects in this and why it's generating such lousy comments. I'm not qualified to tell people where to look for some meat here and help them focus on that. You are.

billy_beef 6y ago

I fail to see how one article being posted signals the decline of this website into a gossip column

DoreenMichele 6y ago
Of course, that assertion is hyperbole. The point being I don't think this really belongs here. I'm someone who finds social stuff very interesting. I mostly don't like gossip rags and a lot of psychological studies are essentially useless garbage. What value does this article really provide? Does it tell us where you can look out for Paul Graham's personal biases in order to get more value out of his writing? Does it propose better answers to anything in particular? This amounts to jealousy or something and it reminds me of an old comic strip where the punch line was to the effect of "After 12 straight hours online this woman is going You People Need To Get A Life!"
- billy_beef 6y ago
  I have to disagree here. The article is criticizing his work, his history of participation in a field, and his current commentary on politics. Yes, it discusses him as a subject, but not as a piece of gossip and strung-together ad hominem's. It is definitely critical of him, but mostly in his capacity as a commentor and his history of being incorrect. It's not second-rate tabloid stuff because of what dimension of him it's mostly considering.
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    Racism, sexism, personal attacks in intellectual circles -- such things all tend to work more or less the same way. Attack them in a way that has plausible deniability and is socially acceptable for some reason. But if you look at the overall pattern of behavior, the real point is to attack or exclude a particular person or particular group of people. Among other things I've had a college class in Social Psychology. I object to a gossipy piece of garbage getting so many upvotes on HN while bringing down the quality of discussion here. If you find something meaty in his analysis of pg's work, then why don't you comment on that instead of arguing with me? If my comments here are so off the mark, why do they have so much attention? This piece is failing to generate meaty discussion. It's mostly generating hot takes about Paul Graham and not commentary on the criticism of his work because the framing of the piece doesn't really fit with the idea that it's about criticizing his work. If it were really about criticizing his work, what we should see here is debate about whether or not that criticism holds water. And I'm not really seeing that.

lkrubner 6y ago

I’m worried that I will either overestimate or underestimate how much you’ve followed the conversation regarding brevity and programming. If I’m saying something you already know, please disregard my comment. In other essays, Zach Tellman has made the point that Clojure is unique in that it’s syntax allows it’s written to form to almost exactly represent its AST tree. The comparison then is between Arc and Clojure and between Paul Graham and Rich Hickey. Both men wrote essays about programming which seemed to promise new ideas but Hickey delivered real innovations whereas we can now see that Graham was unable to deliver. And Graham’s failure is in part traceable to his inability to make explicit what he actually knows, or why he believes the things that he asserts. The debate over how to make tacit knowledge explicit is important. The debate over what constitutes good programming is important to the whole tech industry. I’m astonished that you would think this essay was merely a matter of gossip. It’s possible that Tellman should have repeated some of his earlier essays, to give more context to his remarks, but this is the Web, so he embedded hyperlinks to some of the previous discussions.

lkrubner 6y ago

“The irony is that the attention it gets here may end up accounting for the lion's share of exposure it gets.” Anything that Zach Tellman writes is going to get attention simply because Tellman has a following that takes him seriously.