I have always found Gladwell's work to be interesting, but he suffers severely from confirmation bias. His pieces seem like very well laid out hypotheses with a lot of biased support and no further development nor testing. But again, they are interesting and great conversation starters.
I strongly recommend voting up the original article so that we may refocus the discussion (I did not submit it):
Does this apply to the particular thesis of his in question?
On HN, I've also heard that Seth Godin suffers from "confirmation bias" - but if we generalize about the person, instead of examining each specific thesis (and their support for it), it is an ad hominem argument - however kindly, balanced and reasonable the tone.
The original one is a thorough discussion of Gladwell, his life, and his beliefs. This article was a poorly-written attempt to get hits through controversy alone. It doesn't show Rand off well, and it cites Gladwell out of context.
If you disagree, I'd love to discuss. But let's do it by actually making arguments back and forth. Let's put an effort into it.
I strongly recommend voting up the original article so that we may refocus the discussion (I did not submit it):
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=359511