Of all the posts pointing what Jeff's flaw in logic was. The one post attacking his person instead, saying he's just a mindless bully that should be ignored. Is the most insightful?
Yes, because that's how life goes. I'm not going to attack the logic of an article that is illogical, I'm going to talk about the hypocrisy of the person writing it. The human stuff matters much more than the fantasy world of "logic".
I'm not going to attack the logic of an article that is illogical
It seems to me that is the exactly the type of article you'd want to attack in that way.
If you won't attack arguments with faulty logic on logical grounds, and you can't (correctly) attack arguments with correct logic on logical grounds, that implies you can never refute anyone logically, and that all your arguments will be ad hominems and suchlike.
That makes sense to me. But I also think maybe Zed is saying something along the lines of that proverb, "Don't argue with a fool," and that when it comes to people who are unreasonable it's sometimes easier to point out that they're generally unreasonable. (Though I see your point in that this bad in the same way any generalizations can be bad.)
You confuse self-interest with hypocrisy. I am definitely self-interested and openly admit it, but I try not to be a hypocrite.
For example, I think people should spend their lives learning new things. After I write a few more comments on HN, I'm going to grab my guitar and go learn a new scale. :-)
So, your motive for attack on Jeff is self-interest?
edit: an elaboration
I'm trying to figure out what exactly Jeff wrote that you hate so much. You don't even consider his arguments, you just have "a guess about Jeff, and a general message about other people who feel the same way."
Jeff wouldn't write something like this:
"Don't listen to the hipsters who claim that coding is as vital as reading, and who claim that for the first time in the history you can learn to code, because now we have an online JavaScript course that we call "Code Year" or something like that.
But that is what I've got from his post. He's not against people learning to code, he's against making it into something that it simply isn't - a vital life skill.
I believe it is a vital skill, but that it's not being taught well enough so that's why people don't think it is. The same could be said about nearly everything we teach in K-12 at some point in the subject's history.
Also, it's not an attack, it's a counter-attack. People really need to get their order of events in the right order of events.
He also provides all of his books, in their entirety, for free on his website. He even lets you see his "beta" books, Learn C the Hardway, Learn SQL The Hardway, etc.
He isn't insulting Jeff as a person, nor is he even accusing him of deliberately being a hypocrite. He's just accusing him of a single instance of hypocritical behavior.
Also people who won't listen to Jeff anymore because of this post, or are really angry at him, are likely being hypocritical. He's making the same sort of a mistake as a blogger that many will make as a programmer, especially if we don't discriminate who gets to try their hand at programming. He didn't ship this out to some scary production place where the blogging equivalent of exposing private data for thousands of user accounts might happen. He just blogged it. Likewise, for the most part, new programmers will be limited in the amount of damage they can do.
Damn straight, because I actually care about this stuff. I mean, for all the talk on here about "passion" y'all sure do hate it when people actually are passionate.
Zed, I think you're making the same mistake I did when I started reading hacker news.
Passion means willingness to work your hands to the bone for the startup. Nobody here actually gives a shit about the craft itself. The only aspect of a professional discipline worth being passionate about it its ability to deliver the pie in the sky.
But, I'm passionate about my books. There's nothing wrong with being proud of the things you do. Thinking that you have to never tout yourself is just a form of self-loathing really.