No no no. That's me, but it's not because of anything to do with spotting "a sign of weakness".

Let me try to use a non-car analogy: Imagine I'm a carpenter (I'm not) and you come up to me and ask "how do I build a staircase?". The kinds of thoughts going through my head might be:

1) A staircase is obviously wood, cut to shape, then fixed together. It's also obviously quite a big thing. There's no need to answer with the low level "obvious" things like "you will need a large workshop", if you want to build a staircase you probably already have woodworking tools and experience and now want a bigger project, so an answer telling you basic outline steps would be insultingly patronising and unhelpful.

Also, an answer covering enough steps from scratch would take far too long for a forum post or discussion reply, so if I make the judgement that you don't have any of the experience and haven't considered it at all then you might get a dismissive "with a lot of work" reply.

(OK, maybe if we met informally and you asked, you might be just making conversation, but nobody goes to a technical forum and asks how to build a website just to make friends, do they, so that doesn't apply).

2) On the other hand, if you have spotted the obvious then you're asking one question but meaning another - maybe what kind of wood can I use to make it look nice, what building regs must it comply to, how can I reinforce it, what fireproofing treatments work well? What styles of bannister were popular in Victorian times?

There could be a lot of fun stuff, but again too many directions to go in all in one answer - this is where you get the "it depends what style you want" answer. It's not bullshit, it's better than that, it's skipping straight to acknowledgement, acceptance and directed at whichever obstacle or major design consideration comes to mind first.

So, "how do you build a website that people can join" leads me to think something like:

A website people can join means giving them a form to fill in, keeping their details, and providing a login prompt later. This is obvious to anyone who has used a couple of websites with signup forms.

So either you understand the steps of a site you can signup to and would have Googled until you found out more about those steps and asked a more specific question (What's HTML? What's a webhost? What happens to information in a form once I click submit? How can I keep it around?), or you're really asking for design and obstacle avoidance suggestions, e.g. scaling, security, server load, etc.

Hence the replies: You haven't Googled for the basics, that suggests you aren't ready for the amount of work involved, or you aren't really asking such a basic question so you don't get a basic answer.

There's something about the questioner being unwilling to help themselves. Not a lack of understanding about a topic, but a lack of understanding about understanding in general. A kind of feeling that some people think things are literally magic, not just a chain of connections that anyone learn about and manipulate.

That's not the vibe I get from a lot of the more arrogant types. If somebody asks "How do I make a custom forum" and somebody says "Well, you're going to need to know a lot of things, so if you don't know X Y and Z it's going to take you a lot of learning", that makes a lot of sense, agreed. But the attitude that comes off of a lot of programmers is "Yeah, you can't, don't bother," and I feel that hurts a lot of curious-but-ignorant people.

Exactly. I run a tutorial site for younger webmasters so I get a lot of requests for help. I wouldn't do it if I objected (although it's far too out of date now) but there's a huge difference between someone who's been on my site, searched on Google, constructed some code that they think is on the right lines and struck a wall, and then someone who has thought "hmm, she codes, I'll just get her to do it".

I have had people ask me "how do you program DOS", when they were in fact looking for (among other things):

- How do I write a batch file (easy to explain)

- How do I make a simple console program (slightly tougher, but I could at least point them in the right direction, or show them if they are willing to take the time)

- How do I program my calculator to do trigonometry for me (This was my absolute favorite one, because I could actually show them the basics on the spot! Back in the day, I showed a few people how to do this, who actually turned out to really enjoy doing it!)

- How do I make a game (this is the worst one)

Despite the massive popular appeal of celebrities and fashion, I've never been stuck in a one-on-one conversation with somebody who couldn't figure out that those topics bored me. I've been stranded in group conversations as the lone person who wasn't interested, but that's entirely different. People even figure out pretty quickly that I don't know anything about "Lost" despite how improbably that is. You have to give "normal" people credit for being much, much better than the average computer nerd when it comes to talking your ear off about stuff you don't care about.

(I guess there's another stereotypical dork: the middle-aged businessman who only know how to talk to other middle-aged businessmen, and who talks obsessively about cars, golf, or politics. I only encounter him at weddings, but you entrepreneurial types might run into him more often.)

I forget who said this but it's true: "The secret to success is no secret."

I know lots of people who are hated simply because they try to hard to be liked. Annoyingly friendly to the point of aggravation. They wind up being hated because they don't want to be hated.

And of course if I say something like "Nerds will deny their love of the music stylings of Britney Spears", I will get a ton of "nerds" who don't like Britney Spears at all and say so. But that isn't proof that they secretly like Britney Spears because you correctly predicted the response to an inflammatory statement.

A lot of people are coming up to say that they weren't assholes, that when they were nice they were still victimized, etc., etc. But to you that is only proof of your statement that they are in denial. You are refusing to consider that maybe, you are just wrong, extrapolating from yourself conclusions that don't hold in the larger context.

The toughest group to join was that nerd group, at least in my HS. I assume it was a mixture of not trusting or they thought I was too stupid.

That's what I was trying to say. If "popular" really meant "exclusive", then nerds would be the most popular people around.

As I said in my essay: everybody nowadays is a nerd. Doesn't matter what you get involved in, you're a nerd. I suspect that was true 50 years ago, because Lennon/McCartney were as nerdy brilliant as they come and they still became sex icons. So when I refer to nerds I refer not to people who do nerdy things, but to the nerds that aggressively classify themselves as nerds and invite persecution and antagonizing by doing do.

I mean, considering I'm criticizing the nerd social atmosphere in a lengthy post, it's unlikely that I'm saying nerds suck because they're smart.

I've written an explanation as to why I write the way I do before, but unfortunately with my "unalone" account noprocrasted for the next 2 months and my blog URL and theme changed it doesn't connect with how things were before. Here's a basic summary: on this blog, I write essentially everything that comes to mind. So yesterday, I wrote blurbs about passionate argument, the importance of efficient coding, misanthropy, Samuel Beckett, this particular piece, an update on my design progress. Two days ago it was on capitalism, pick-up artists (inspired by an HN post, actually), ADD, and the problems of young people dating?

I'm not a particularly negative person. I love the life I have and the people I know. At the same time, however, I made a pretty conscious decision a little while ago that I'm writing this blog for myself rather than for other people. Back in January I rather expected this blog to fade away and be ignored entirely, once I started basically writing lengthy pieces on impulse, several times a day. The fact that readers have increased makes me a little uncomfortable. It means that I find pieces like this one on web sites I'd rather they weren't. This is not a good piece. It's dashed out in 20 minutes and posted without a look back. And yes, it's a negative piece; yes, I find myself writing a lot of lashy things. It's by no means the majority of what I write - my average post tends to be more optimistic in nature. But those lashy things are a part of my existing, and I've learned through the last few months that a lot of people go through certain experiences I used to think were mine and mine alone.

So I write about things like young entrepreneurs in a way that could be seen as lashing out at them. I write about people with bad taste and people with no social skills and ugly people. That's a pretty big breach of polite writing, when I spend time talking about my dislike of people who aren't physically attractive. But that's kind of the point: I don't want this to be a polite blog. I'm in the process of creating a tech blog for my revised, good pieces, because I hate being put on Hacker News for shitty pieces. This is not a blog for hackers. It is a blog for myself and for every irrelevant thought that hits my head during the day, and the people who've assembled to read it are a ragtag bunch of personalities that I'd never expect to all center around a blog like mine. I'm grateful for that, and I love the people I've met through it, and I'm not going to be changing the format of the blog. Just keep in mind that what you're reading is written in a very specific style, one that leads to negativity and hostility, and that I'm very aware of the quality level of this stuff, which is why this didn't come as a link directly from me.

I'm still at the point where I just don't like most people, especially in groups. It's a problem that I struggle with. I hope to figure out how to make things better - some people I know can find interesting parts of anybody - but I won't pretend like I know the solution to this problem.

Are you saying that a young, bright 18-year-old shouldn't write at all because he knows that most of what he says is wrong? Because that sounds kind of stupid. I'd rather more people my age write and be entirely wrong and start talking back and forth amongst one another, so they all mature and get wiser. This is merely my contribution to that.

Do I approve of nudity in a presentation? No. But at the same time, even if I found it offensive, I wouldn't turn it into a huge argument and the focal point of a rant against a community.

I'm really, really in the minority with this statement, but I find it very easy to deal with intolerant people. I have friends who are almost certainly racist. A lot of the people I know are casually homophobic. I think that's sickening, but I don't turn that into a rallying point of a campaign. The attitude that I was taught as a kid was that the best way to change things is to lead by example.

Now, being upset over using nude women to draw attention, that makes sense. Voicing displeasure makes sense. But there's a line between that and turning that issue into one that directly attacks the community. When you're part of a community about coding, you'd best be focused on the code. If you don't like DHH, you ignore him. If you don't like Obie Fernandez, you ignore him. The language is what matters, and it's a large enough language that if you know what you're doing, you can find people who are willing to help.

Now, look at the attitude of the Rails community towards beginners: they are incredibly kind and cool and open about it all. (This extends to what parts of the Ruby community I've interacted with.) If you don't know a thing about programming, they'll help you, and they usually come across not as nerds but as socially normal people. I don't know if they really are, but their leaders certainly are: they have their priorities straight. I've never been party to a group of programmers that seemed as normal as the Ruby bunch.

So when DHH applauds the presentation, the message he's giving isn't "RoR approves of this." He's just saying this as a leader. He's saying this as DHH, a rude dude who loves to be crude. The fact that he's the leader is entirely apart from the fact that he's saying this. That's why he's so interesting to read. That's why 37signals is such a good blog. It doesn't matter that they're rich and successful and in charge of stuff: they're a good blog because they write good posts, and all that other stuff is an aside. Meanwhile, in the rest of the programming world people are all-too-quick to judge a person as a single, solid entity. Steve Jobs is evil because iTunes has DRM. Bill Gates is stupid because Windows is ugly. Jason Fried is a jackass who never does work because other people waste their time reading SvN archives. Ruby on Rails is bad because their developers are immature. It's the same approach of solidarity that leads nerds to decide all jocks are stupid, all different people are meaningless, and anything that looks nice can't be nice because it's coming from non-nerds.

Can you not see that the captain of the football team is way less likely to be harassed than the math dweeb?

I'm saying that if math was cool and football wasn't, the captain of the modern football team would probably still be really popular. He might be really into math. I know the sorts of people who were football captains, and they're inherently likable partly because they're not obnoxious assholes in the same way. They're the sorts of assholes people like.

As I said earlier: when a football player joined a group of nerds he'd start talking to us and we'd all start to really like him. If I joined a group of football players I would turn quiet and snappy. If I was willing to risk being more social, I have no doubts that I'd have been accepted.

Everybody who attempts to climb the social ladder succeeds, because people above you really would prefer you climb up.

Of course I don't agree with bullying. I'm not a huge fan of violence, particularly not for stupid shit like school. But there's an attitude amongst this type of person that says they are entirely not to blame for the harassment they get, just because they act smart or whatnot. I don't think that's the case. I used to get mocked a lot in school and looking back on it, I think that I deserved it entirely. Similarly, some people go out of their way to invite harassment, and they use that as a point about how people who harass other people suck. I'd even go so far as to call it reverse harassment. I certainly did that as well: I'd provoke people into making fun of me by going out of my way to be eccentric. It's stupid behavior and while it might not be as bad as actually harassing a person, it's still inexcusable.

First off, I have a hard time picturing how someone can be that much of a "jerk" by answering a teacher's question.

In one of my courses this semester, there's a kid with an irritating laugh and a loud voice who refuses to stop making comments about how Microsoft is dead and dying, how Linux is going to be huge by the end of 2009, how Apple is evil, how Firefox is the best web browser and adheres the best to web standards. Every discussion we have he jumps in on, interrupting students and advocating his own misinformed, sensationalist, frankly stupid opinions, under the guise that he's being a good participant by doing so.

In one of my senior-year courses, there were honors students, kids ranked in the top 10 for our year, who, in round-circle literary discussions, would say things like "I think the pig on the stick is symbolic. I don't exactly know what it's for, but it seems like there's a reason for it being there." In that particular discussion, after I talked about how the pig's head represents in some ways an attempt at order that pretends to itself that it has meaning, that particular person jumped in saying, "Precisely what I was saying. It's that it's symbolic. And there was a reason, just like Rory added on."

There is answering questions because you know the answers - and some people do that, and they're completely fine, and no matter how many they answer nobody seems to mind - and there are the people who are jerks about it. The obnoxious popping-up hand, the calls of "Ooh! Ooh!", the smarmy attitude about all of it. It's a jerk thing to do. It's just as bad as the snobby girl who makes fun of fat kids, or the fashion guru who sneers at people who wear Gap (or whatever fashion gurus sneer at). And just like I don't think teasing and sneering is stuff that deserves violence, being a jackass in class isn't something that you should be beaten up over - but neither is it completely harmless and mild. Being somebody who likes to be scathing at times, I find that I go after those wannabe teacher's pets just as much as I go after other sorts of people.

Your implication that those being tormented are more at fault than the tormentors sickens me.

Just to be entirely clear: my implication is that there is blame to be found on both sides. That is nearly always my implication in these scenarios. I think the tormentors are more at fault, in this case, but I can't bring myself to side entirely with the tormented.

Further, I would submit that it _is_ wrong to let a generalization masquerade as a general truth in public.

In any case, I think what I wrote in the other thread about how I'm separating the concepts of "cause" and "blame" should clear this up.

Personally, I find it much more helpful not to worry about who to blame for unpopularity itself, and to focus more on what is _done_ to the unpopular. And the responsibility for that is much more clear.

To discuss a problem, you need to get to its root. The root of the problem is twofold: people on one side are too willing to ostracize themselves, and people on the other side don't want to spend time learning about people. My belief is that it's not the responsibility of others to spend time trying to understand you. I think that bullying is a problem, but frankly, if nerds were ostracized but not actively bullied I would find a hard time blaming the other kids and not the nerds. I actually discussed this problem with a professor: my solution to this problem would be twofold. First, get the other kids to realize why nerd things are cool. If people think programming is really super neato, then suddenly programmers are neato too. (It worked with math in my school: once you like math, then math geeks are pretty awesome kids. By my junior year all of the math kids hung out with the jock/class clown group.) At the same time, though, you've got to do the same in reverse. Teach the nerds to appreciate the non-nerds. Intolerance works both ways, and there are a lot of people willing to dismiss sports players or actors or musicians or artists or preps as stupid and meaningless, and what this essay's all about is that in my experience, the nerds are usually a lot less tolerant than the other people. My first day in college, when my roommate arrived, I was unpacking a virtual library, and he was carrying a volleyball, and my first impression was that we wouldn't get along because he wouldn't "understand" me. This year's taught me a lot about how you can be smart and not be a nerd, and I honestly think that the nerds are less aware of this than the other groups.

This is not the same as "Everyone who attempts to climb the social ladder succeeds", what you are saying here is more like "Everyone who succeeds at climbing the social ladder attempts it". The latter is true, the former is what I objected to. You are ignoring the people who attempted and failed.

Paul writes brilliant essays, but I find that if he has a weakness as an essayist, it is probably in over generalization. Many of his essays have pretty sweeping generalizations, but a dearth of data justifying them. His brilliance is that he usually overcomes this by appealing to his reader's intuitions, and it usually works. But there are times when I find myself wondering if he is just extrapolating from his own experience to a larger scale than is warranted.

No. But your essay reads like they _all_ are.

> But everybody does that.

That's no excuse.

> Martyr?

Yes. Here's another example: "I'm saying that I have a right to write what I think is right". Nobody ever tried to take that right away from you, least of all me. All I did was say that you were wrong, but you have decided to carry on like I am persecuting you by attempting to take away your rights. Martyr.

> But the criticism against me for writing this piece in the first place offends me, and I don't think I'm being an asshole martyr for saying that.

Again, I never called you an asshole or criticized you as a person, as opposed to something specific that you said. Now you're being a martyr in response to me saying that you are writing with a martyr mentality.

My gut reaction to you, as a parent, taking part in this discussion is that people put in a position of authority over children seem to instinctively start denying their own human weaknesses. I'm interested to hear what you would say about that. When it comes to social bullying and exclusion, in my experience, adults never acknowledged that we were going through a difficult process of learning adult behaviors. Implicitly, they pretended that there was no grown-up way to do what we were doing, because social divisions and inequalities did not exist in the adult world.

I think we could have regarded adults as valuable sources of coaching if they had just been honest instead of trying to be perfect, inhumanly pure role models. You know, even socially dominant teenagers are clumsy and self-conscious. They would probably appreciate some tips on how to enforce social boundaries without being jerks about it. That would benefit everyone. As a parent, could you even do such a thing, or would it compromise your authority too much to admit that adults do the same things that teenagers do, only much more subtly and gracefully?

First off, on what planet do you think it's alright to hurt someone physically for anything they say? You'd actually punch someone in the face who's arguing with your stupid comments?

Second, if you get raped and do nothing about it that's your fault? I think Andrea Dworkin just ate her fist. One of the most vile offensive acts a person can do to a weaker person and you say it's the victim's fault? That they're somehow complicit?

Third, battered women deserve their beatings? Didn't you say that you wrote your stupid poorly written blog post in response to the whole Porno Ruby Conference Offending Women news lately? How in the _hell_ can you even pretend to claim you give a rat's ass about women if you think any of the above?

Alright, I gotta stop before I step into territory where I get banned from HN. However, I have one statement I'd like to see you fumble a reply to:

I can fully understand your hatred of geek arrogance, since I can't stand it myself, but even at my most obnoxious I never said that rape, beatings, torture, and abuse of the weak were defensible.

Every person who has been abused never deserved the _level_ of abuse they received. Whether it's children, or women, or just someone who's different, the abuser is always more powerful and enjoys hurting people weaker than them. Because of this, they take any tiny little offense and turn it into a reason to nearly kill another human being. Even if the victim changes every single thing about themselves to please the abuser, it's not enough.

The abuse continues, not because of the victim, but because it satisfies the abuser.

Using the dual nature of the word "responsibility" is a common ploy to distribute blame to everybody equally when discussions of blame become counterproductive. That can be appropriate in some situations, especially team situations, but applying it to rape and domestic abuse is way over the line. It's repellant.

Look man, you said you had a solution to the problem. What I said is hardly a leap. You have a funny definition of "drastic proportions".

> But no, you won't address the ideas I put forth. You'll nitpick. You'll be an absolute snot just so that you can gain the upper hand in an argument. And so you might reach a point where I and people like me get tired of your bullshit and walk away, and then you'll declare yourself the victor because you were the last person to make a post in my comment thread, but all you're doing is making the person on the other side want to punch yourself in the face...

You're descending into ad hominem territory here. Please don't.

I didn't address your solution because I don't think there is one, and I don't see value in arguing about it. Perhaps I misunderstand the problem you're trying to solve.

> They're interconnected.

I never said they weren't - I limited my discussion to the assigning of blame, which I took to be your primary subject as well. But now, it seems to me that you are not separating the issues of "cause" and "blame" the same way I am.

To be clear, of course the victims are part of the cause of any particular confrontation. It couldn't happen if they weren't there, so there's at least that. What I object to is assigning _blame_ to them. Causes for these things are shared - blame is given to one side or the other for their own actions.

Your commentaries on battered wives and rape focus on what happens _after_ the incident. I am asking about the incident itself. The blame for the raping and the beating lies solely with the aggressors.

> Is McDonald's to blame for making people fat? Partly.

No. McDonald's is to blame for making fatty food. There's a difference.

If he complained about people not calling him sensitive with that logo of his, then I'd call him out for being a hypocrite. That's what I'm doing with nerds: I think that nerds go out of their way to be disliked and then complain that nobody likes them.

Nah, that's a completely sensible point. I don't think it's hard to make programming seem cool, though: there are some very awesome things that've been made. WeFeelFine comes to mind. Talk about how something beautiful like that was made and it'll at least make people realize more that programmers can be artists, too. (Not the best example, but it's what first comes to mind.)

Have I ignored something else that annoys you?

Nope.

Sure. The way it's written, it seems like you are referring to all nerds, but I will assume that this is not the case.

Yeah. I could revise this, but I don't think it would be worth it. It wasn't a major piece of writing, in any event.

If you don't like being generic, then why the hell were you nothing but a bag of gross generalizations in your stupid little essay?

It's not an essay. It's a blog post. I write fast and I write long and I publish everything that I write because I adhere to the belief that perhaps something I write will help somebody with something. I treat my blog like a blog. It's not a professional platform. The stuff I do in my life I keep entirely separate from all the things I write. If I ever got to the point where my sole source of fame was a web site with my name on it, I'd consider myself to have done a piss-poor job with my life. Same if the only thing I had going for my name was an ill-conceived rant clustered around by people who prefer rage to straight thinking.

As it is, I've gotten responses from people to this that've thanked me for writing it. That means that for 20 minutes' work it was time well-spent. My frustration doesn't come from disagreement. It comes from the fact that my post, which is about as good as 20 minutes' worth of quick typing can get you, got put on Hacker News, which is a place where intelligent people discuss meaningful things, when this is a piece that deals in overgeneralities.

When I wrote this piece, my thought wasn't "How can I capture the high school experience?" It was "What is it about this type of programmer that really annoys me?" I hit on my conclusion, which I still stand by, and wrote all the thoughts I've got on the subject matter, typed it quickly, and put it online. I thought it would get a handful of responses. Nothing big, because it's not big or at all important. I wrote two or three things yesterday that I think are better than this particular piece.

But you just ignored the post I just made to focus on my original post, which I've already apologized for. It's obvious that of the two people I said you might be, you're the latter. You're ranting at a mindset that I don't actually have just so that you can be Fucking Awesome Zed now that your blog's been toned down. If you really want to get pissed off at me for things I don't believe, you have every right. But I'm through with this. I expected better from you.