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>PS: I am a 'she'.

Oo, soory about that.

>why would anyone believe

I'm not asking anyone to believe. I'm asking to have a discussion on the points I bring forward.

>how does that reconcile with your apparent theory that work done for free is valueless

Work done for free has value. I was discussing the psychology & relationship between employer and employee when all employees at the company are already salaried and "new person" comes in and offers to work for free.

>you are using HN to practice sounding confident

That's not the way I would put it. I think (similarly to pg) that points are best expressed tersely, and so I try to keep my writings very brief and to the point.

>sounding like an idiot

Why, thank you.

>Learning to use simple qualifiers like 'in my experience'

Not necessary. This follows from the context.

>being easily tripped up

I don't see where I've been easily tripped up. Though I do enjoy that so many people jumped to respond. Even though almost no one managed or even really tried to refute my points and rather took issue with other things (boohoo you don't have enough experience to be talking about this kind of stuff, etc.)

>Then you will say 'obviously I meant this advice only for y'

This is Hacker News. We're talking tech startups here. Yeah I won't add another paragraph to talk about other industries because it's _obvious_ to everyone what I'm talking about and "Don't work for free" is an oft repeated advice on here anyways.

>'because I made a bunch of stupid assumptions!' but feel too ashamed to say that and start blustering.

I think that none of the assumptions I made are stupid. Though I am starting to notice that if I don't carefully package my opinions I will get a bunch of people in the comments who APPEAR to talk about the points I made, when really they're just annoyed at my attitude. This leads to the kind of circulatory arguing we see here, when my advice is sound but people still feel I should be less confident about my position.

>You might as well say 'database x is always the best choice'.

I would only say something like that if the purpose of the database was very clear from the context. I would never randomly drop such a statement onto HN, because everyone here uses all kinds of different databases. Your analogy is invalid.

>100 monkeys typing could have come up with the world's greatest business plan. However in practice, that does not make it worth people's time to read everything typed by monkeys.

Again an analogy that does not work. However much time however many monkeys spend on trying to understand human psychology they will not make much headway. Though if _I_ as a fellow human, take some time to try and understand human psychology, I do think it is worth the time to hear my points and argue on their merits, no matter if I had 0 or 100 jobs before. If I'm indeed talking gibberish, you're free to try and argue against my points, but since I see you talking about everything BUT my points, I'm assuming that you don't really take issue with them, but rather with me.




If I leave some of the thorns on, I tend to get more replies

I take issue with both your points and with you. I had written up a fairly thorough response, but I'm not interested in talking to someone who is basically trolling for attention. If you don't think your points are interesting enough to discuss on their merits, I guess it's a valid strategy to inject a bunch of extraneous flamebait, but you can hardly expect to be taken seriously for complaining that people address your flamebait presentation instead of your weak argument.


I think what you're trying to say to me has merit, but you keep overreaching in your choice of words to a point that makes it extremely difficult for me to respond positively. If you say that I

- sound like an idiot

- am blustering because I'm ashamed I'm in the wrong

- think open source is valueless

- am ignorant

These are only some of the excerpts but I keep noticing that you read what I say and then concoct some grand scheme in your head instead of taking the precise wording I used to closer heart. Disagree? Then please point me to the "extraneous flamebait" I injected into my very terse OP. Maybe it's extraneous flamebait to you that I don't preface my thoughts with "In my experience ..." ?

>I had written up a fairly thorough response

I appreciate hearing your thoughts - after all that's the reason I'm on here writing these replies. Though I do feel that you take the gist of what I'm saying, creating another standpoint adding some of your own summaries of what what you believe I'm talking about to that and then arguing against that.

Again. In my OP I told OP not to say he wants to work for free and not to say out right that he's willing to work 12/7 if he wants to maximize his chances of landing a job. Do you disagree with that? If you do, I would be happy to hear your thoughts.


I think what you're trying to say to me has merit, but you keep overreaching in your choice of words to a point that makes it extremely difficult for me to respond positively

You could call them thorns, and see if you can draw any parallels to your own communication style, like the way you constantly overreach the actual points you're able to make. If your OP was so terse, how were you able to boil down your points from three paragraphs originally to a single sentence here? (Hint: you left out all the extraneous flamebait in this version).




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