Having an abrasive (see Calacanis), or egotistical, or whatever your bit may be, can be an effective way of gaining more readers and attracting a following.

The opposite would be waffling, and we'd all be talking about how Aaron doesn't seem sure of himself and waffles on issues he talks about.

So you're screwed either way, really.

I just wish he'd grow some balls and actually finish a project instead of giving up and moving on to the next thing. Successful startups that start out sucky keep on improving even though everyone says they suck. Aaron seems to move on to the next great idea in hopes that it'll suck less, and it inevitably doesn't.

It has nothing whatsoever to do with cajones! This is a common trait of inventive individuals - they have so many great ideas that it's hard to keep on one track. What Aaron needs to find is his more conservative counterpart to wrangle his concepts into full-fledged businesses when he grows bored and moves on.

I say this as someone very much like Aaron, with a long trail of half-finished projects and a couple that I actually saw through long enough to bring to fruition.

I don't think his projects are bad or anything, but his writing just drips of egotism that makes him a great target for attack.

As for the dripping with egotism bit, that is an interesting problem. I probably would have sounded like that too at his age, but back in the pre-Web era there was no way for anyone to read what most 20 year olds wrote. Now that people can start publishing so much younger, we'll have to learn to be more tolerant of various flaws of youth.

Maybe he needs someone with more life experience who is experienced at writing for the web to advise him on how not to "drip" his egotism quite so much while still communicating his point. Maybe even someone with a past business relationship with Aaron who he might respect.

Not to name names or anything. :)

I wonder what Swartz will be like when he's 40.

this is like the movie idiocracy where luke wilson gets called "faggy" because he has a command of the english language.

i think pg defends him so (puts him into yc, puts him in reddit etc..) because aaron has a good balance of intelligence and doing things well. he's a good weapon for anything intellectual.

(From http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html)

I wonder what the reddit guys think of aaronsw.

http://www.drankkit.com/

Submitted for evidence.

"And what did he talk about? A screwup by a restaurant he went to. And how the host worked hard, overhard even, to pacify him about it."

...

"Cooling out marks is how institutions persuade people to accept things they think are wrong. The con-man convinces you getting stolen from is OK. Your job convinces you it's OK that they're corrupt. The restaurant persuades you it's OK that they're incompetent."

So, if someone at a restaurant makes some kind of mistake, and the host works hard to make it right, it is important to not forgive them and go on holding a grudge, because that would just make you "the mark". I think that's the moral he's putting forth here.

And furthermore, you should hold the same kind of grudges against inanimate entities, like "the economy".

"Did the economy cheat you, fire you, stick you in some crappy job with a crabby boss? Listen, the motivational speaker explains, it's not the economy's fault."

So, remember, the Economy is out to get you! I don't even know what this means. Corporate CEOs, sure. Congress and the President, sure. Illegal immigrants, I suppose you could argue a case there if you really wanted to. But anthropomorphizing the economy seems a little off, to me.

Obviously, Aaron is a guy with high intelligence and substantial skill. He played a part in a successful company at a very early age, has contributed some highly praised source code to the open source community, and is still ambitious, idealistic and involved in a lot of things. But reading his blog makes me think he's also a little wacky.

But, as pg pointed out, thank God I didn't have a blog that the entire world could read when I was in my early 20s!

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/decenttodo

How to write software that people want is something Aaron knows about and he expresses himself well on that topic.

a) Somebody anonymously and publicly calls you names in plausible-seeming ways that others will read.

b) Somebody publicly claims to be better than everybody, including you the reader. Everybody reads him.

It's pretty clear that a is more damaging. Even if it goes out to fewer people. It is fallacious to reason that it's not so bad because it is hurting one person rather than many. On the one hand generality dilutes criticism. On the other the effects of libel can be greatly non-linear in who reads them, and when.

If his criticism is wrong, let it fail on its own merit. I love your essays Paul, but this seems like a "Support the Troops" style deflection.

Perhaps you could publish qwertyy's IP address.

John.

John.

Now, I'm not saying that people don't have a right to privacy. You'll note that I don't talk about private issues on my blog (such as my family) and I think those are irrelevant to my interaction in a forum like this. But I'm much happier when people identify themselves so that I can follow them over time.

There are good arguments for being able to be anonymous on the net (for example in the case of human rights abuses in countries it may be useful to be able to transmit information anonymously; or if we implement voting on the net). I don't think those arguments apply in a public discussion forum like this.

Of course, I'm probably an outlier on this, I'd expect a group of engineers to be fairly pro-anonymity.

John.

I've noticed that a surprising number of people live two lives-- one on the internet and one in person. I can respect a decision to live like that, even if the behaviors differ between the online and offline lives, even if the two lives are separate. Now, I don't exactly condone this behavior, but I think anyone should have the right to do it. Forcing everyone to forgo anonymity prevents some people from doing that, because it fuses the online and offline lives.

But I can certainly understand where somebody has a public image that can be damaged by some random poster, so I'm with pg to some extent. I think a better question would be about this whole hero worship idea in general. Guys like Woz are great hackers, no doubt about it. But are they really worth the elevated platform many of us put them on? I don't think so. I don't read pg essays because hey, it's another pg essay! I read some of them because they were helpful.

So I can understand the frustration many people feel when it looks like they are being sold on reading blog material simply because of the hype surrounding somebody's name. Quite frankly, I find that useless to me personally. So make the comment about _that_, and not some particular person.

The interesting undercurrent in this discussion is that the technical world is very much a reputation, name-dropping, hero worship kind of place. As much as we all understand the importance of finding and servicing users in our startups, let's be honest: teams are going to get rewarded by both the investment community and the marketplace based on PR factors. That makes an attack like this one even worse, cause it hits somebody right in the pocketbook.

Your argument that I'm wasting vertical space makes a lot of sense, especially given the clean look of reddit/news.yc compared with /.

From now on I'll stop signing.

But that would be fine, if you didn't try to pass off your personality defect as an ideology for everyone to follow, as you did in this thread. That was what sent me over the edge.

Signing messages was unrelated to anonymity, it's a years old habit that I started on Usenet and continued in online forums like this one. I don't claim that signing messages is part of the ideology I was talking about above. If I did I wouldn't have stopped.

It amuses me that you choose to describe it as a 'personality defect' from behind an anonymous account here. If we were standing face to face would you describe me signing messages in that way?

How do you figure? There are enough people who like Swartz and have pull in the Web 2.0 world that a post like this could really hurt your career.

Personally, I think it would have been better if had been done in a less vicious way and not done it anonymously, or just not posted it on the internet, but now that it's done I think he(?) has very valid reasons for wanting to stay anonymous.

And I don't agree that a post like that could really hurt your career. It's nonsense to think that being an asshole is going to ruin your career. There are plenty of total dicks out there (not saying that the original poster is one) who are successful. What matters is not that you are Web 2.0 and buddy-buddy with someone who's got a high profile blog, what matters is that you make a decent product.

John.

Most of the books he recommends are really good (I just bought "Punished by rewards" after finding it through his site. It's a great book.)

So he doesn't finish his projects and does some drama. So what? His projects are almost always decent (I enjoyed reddit, have played around with web.py, have used books.theinfo.org several times and liked the first few chapters of his novel), sometimes noble (the site giving advice to school kids) and quite often useful.

Get a life and lay off him. The real reason you are doing this is because he got rich of Reddit while still a teenager and you think he didn't deserve it. So what? That's life for you and he's still an o.k. guy.

Although I dropped web.py for Pylons for new project I really like the idea behind web.py and applaud him for starting and continuing to oversee this project (though a bunch of new work is being done by other great hackers like Anand).

But if you're new to Python web frameworks, I'd start with web.py and write a few apps with that. It's much simpler to get into, and you'll understand how things work a bit better.

Aside from that, Pylons is just a better design. Routes, Mako, and SQLAlchemy are an incredibly powerful toolset, without being overcomplicated.

That it is still pretty good for a young guy. He probably has work/startup ADD. Starting lots of things, but never finishing anything up. Maybe lack of discpline, b/c of lack of work ethics guidance when he was a kid?

Other than that boh... Now qweartyy, why so jelous of him?

I like Aaron Schwartz. He's smart and original and he writes well.

I would not, however, pay him $200,000 to show up at my party.

Lots of startups end up going nowhere, it takes more than brains and ingenuity, a bit of luck and fortunate timing also comes into play...

Still, Aaron has had a heck of career already -- hell, I didn't even graduate from college until I was 23 (of course at that time, the PC was just a toy, and most Americans did own one, and programmers mostly worked on 24x80 green screen terminals in that day...), yet he reached the pinnacle for a programmer...

just a side note for fun

Paris Hilton is a marketing genius ...

her stake in the Hilton hotels is worth just under 30mil in total

she makes over 20mil annually just by selling her own products, and using her name

she is not the only rich girl out there, but she def is the most successful one no matter how much you like her or hate her

and she does have a huge target market and does a great job at satisfying them

also: it won't be hard for you to prove pg is wrong, just sign your name and leave a link to yourself on your profile... but I wonder if you'll do that?

Really I don't know. But now I guess I have to look around and find out. Thanks for letting me know that I should know something about this celebrity, lest I come off like a bumpkin.

Actually screw it. I am lazy and not interested in this. So I will just be a bumpkin who doesn't know. Besides I am 40 and thus will never run with the celebrity crowd in any case. Yawn...

Your points:

a - That's pretty impressive, at 13 what were you doing, and the rest of us?

b - I don't know the specifics of the merger, but that happens all the time, and good for him.

c - He is a good starter and most people go through many startups before they hit it big.

d - That many people seem to like.

This whole comment has nothing to do with hacker news or startups. I'm surprised it got past PG and I can't believe how many people actually commented on something that isn't worth commenting on. Thanks for wasting my time.

You're just being nasty, and doing it anonymously ... really.

Like this one?

I wouldn't say famous which is such a "media cliche". More recognised for his contributions. There's the

- rss spec http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/start.html?pg=5/

- rdf spec - http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-rdfcore-wg/2001Apr/0...

- webpy python web framework http://webpy.org/

- writing http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/productivity

Maybe the biggest thing Aaron may have to offer is speaking out - a trait that seems to be devoid in his generation ~ http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/shifting1 As much as he might an annoying "shirt" to some, you cannot take credit away from the technical work he's done at such a young age.

Last time I checked Paris Hilton didn't exactly fit in this category.

qwertyy's a throwaway pseudonym with one post to his name. If he gets publicly humiliated, he can simply create a new account, and nobody's the wiser.