Hey - thank you! I'm okay with being bashed - I just think I'm being misread. I never intended this to be a prescriptive guide to success, just some reflection on what I, myself, have learned from the process.

Thank you for reading, and for being open to the idea that this is just my experience!

I can see that there are about an equal number of negative and positive comments to the post, and an even higher number of neutral ones.

Overall I definitely cannot see where the "bashing by HN community" is.

HN community also bashed Dropbox when it was new.

No it didn't. It gave some constructive criticism:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

So take what the HN community says with a grain of salt? Noted.

... and Slashdot bashed the iPod.

CmdrTaco / Rob Malda criticized it famously, but it appears the comments were pretty supportive.[1]

[1] http://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ip...

To be fair, Slashdot bashed the iPod (2001), not the iPod + iTunes w/ Store (2003).

I think that's a pretty big difference.

I apologise for not being positive about this article. But it's because of the way it was written. It is written like: this is what i did, and you should do the same.

The big figure was intended to do what it did: publicity. Congratulations to Joel on that! It worked out pretty well:)

The way you have read it is more like it was an advice. But to me it was not written like that.

You really don't have to apologize, I can see how it'd be read that way, and I'm culpable for that.

I know you say publicity like it's a dirty or cheap word - but, what writer doesn't want people to read their work? What person doesn't want their story to get traction?

Yes, it feels a bit cheap to throw numbers for attention. But my honest goal was not to wave a financial number like I've "made it", but use that as a means of opening the floor for discussion and sharing.

I appreciate that to many people, that's going to seem really insincere, but I hope that the rest of the piece made it worth your time.

"I know you say publicity like it's a dirty or cheap word"

No, I don't. You should not have read it like that ;-) I thought because you are a freelancer you were looking for publicity. The big number is a bit cheap, but if it works... So the congrats was actually a real congrats. Not that many people managed to get on top of HN.

Weird thing is, i received so many points on my initial "bashing" comment. I thought i would have ended up with -10 at least. I expected the comment above to receive 1 point but it ends up in the -. Ah well.

All in all it is quite amazing how differently the same thing can be interpreted.

Not saying you're wrong, but a useful trick in life is to always give the benefit of the doubt to others.

I think there are valuable things in that article, and I worry that you may have missed them because you didn't like the tone - which is a shame for the author, but possibly also a shame for you.