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Comment by happytoexplain | Hacker News Reader

This takes an agonizing amount of vertical space to discuss the fundamental concept of different numeric types and how literals are mapped to them (assuming they do get to the part about literals - I didn't get that far). It's not because the author is long-winded, but because they are pushing the "cute bantering dialogue" style of writing to its logical extreme.

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Programmers, much like compilers, read things until they reach a point they disagree with and then stop there to write a comment.

Yet unlike compilers, they don't handle obfuscation well.

Please don't imply that I stopped reading because I merely disagreed with something the author said or did. As I implied in my post, I stopped because I found the reading itself to be difficult and unenjoyable. Framing that as "a point [I] disagree with" is uncharitable to me and makes it sound like I'm making an unreasonable or pompous criticism of the author's opinion on the topic about which he is writing.

This criticism comes up every time one of Amos’ posts shows up here. If you don’t like the style that’s fine but it’s not like you have some novel criticism here.

Fortunately it's novel to plenty of other people here. Crisis averted!

In general people post their criticisms here because it’s assumed, perhaps arrogantly but often justifiably, that authors read HN and will see them.

I normally don't mind Amos' style but this one was actually a little too much. So I'd consider that novel criticism. The quantity will add into the feedback and provide context.

It is in tldr territory. If I am going to read a book I need to have a careful think and read some reviews first to see if that is worth my time.

I haven't noticed, but I also don't assume anything I say is novel. However, being novel isn't necessary for adding information. If a hundred people have the same criticism vs if three people have the same criticism, those two scenarios say different things, and therefore each represent different pieces of information, so the extra 97 people in the former case are adding information on the whole despite not individually saying something novel.

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