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.
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.
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.
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.