[bugs]

This article comes off as rather offensive to me, it must be the language and constant ego bashing of nerds, but one thing that doesn't make sense is when Zed Shaw said he put his ego aside as he obviously didn't and was angry that his about page had fed these random music comments and is obviously upset that people took his about page seriously.

[lonestar]

He said he put his ego aside in regards to redesigning his webapp to appeal to a wider audience, rather than what he wanted.

It doesn't seem terribly egotistical to want to correct people who are spreading an inaccurate representation of his product.

[bugs]

It does when he is angry at people for stating information in the about page and he expects those people to know his about page is wrong.

He may actually be sincere in his thank you but the whole article made his tone snobbish in my mind so I didn't take it as real.

[dandelany]

At least to me, he doesn't come off as angry at anyone other than himself for forgetting to fix his About page. In fact, he says several positive things about HN readers:

"the value of a natural feedback system is greater than any promotional value I would get out of submitting things myself."

"...an excellent positive result of the HN barometer"

"I think of HN as a barometer of what people think."

"Thank you Hacker News"

On the whole, the post is about how Hacker News enabled him to get a read on community sentiment about Fret Wars. This is absolutely a positive thing. He's not blaming HN for continuing to think the site is about randomly generated music, he's blaming himself, and praising HN for helping him discover his mistake.

Now if I was a guitar player, I might be offended... :)

[pohl]

It came off entirely different to me. I thought it was a hilarious tale of a forehead-slapping revelation and subsequent frustrations in trying to put a genie back in the bottle. Paragraph 5 about guitarists really tickled my funny bone, in a you-laugh-because-it's-so-true kind of way.

I had just been thinking about some of the themes in the article. Yesterday's thread about how Emacs is now using Bazaar for source control illustrates this well: people believe that Bazaar is a fork of arch (this hasn't been true for a couple years). He's absolutely right that it's hard to get our demographic to update our opinions.

[logicalmind]

The way I interpret the article is that he is riffing on the fact that Hacker News members are generally interested in startups and likely believe in the constant release and iterate cycles that are used to determine a viable concept or product.

He might be pointing out the fact that those kind of people are stuck on the "random music" idea he used initially and not giving him valuable feedback on his evolving idea. But I'm just guessing.