They certainly don't speak for me. In fact while I found this post interesting, and I like how the author tried to get into Traister's mindset to empathize with how he may have become misguided, I felt like it meandered into personal attacks a bit more than necessary.

Maybe I'm just sensitive because I have gotten excited about having learned something and rushed to share my knowledge, only to be cut off at the knees by the more august folks who told me I was in fact doing it wrong. :-)

But also, we've all written bad code, right? Have you ever written code that you've held your nose while writing, working under annoying idiosyncrasies of the problem domain / business requirements, and you just know at some point another developer is going to come along and read that code without having the full context of the situation, and think you're an idiot, and you won't be there to defend yourself?

While it's not quite the same situation that's the kind of empathy I'm feeling here. Who knows the circumstances that led to this book. The author of this blog post admits there was a dearth of material on learning C pointers at the time so I think Traister's heart was in the right place in trying to fill that gap, however misguided.

Only yesterday, I read a comment by someone on HN in which he wished hacking should be punished with death penalty/jail term.

Fortunately that comment appears to be gone.

I'm surprised there is no way to report one of those on the site.

There is a feedback form in the lower right and the email address.