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Comment by mthwl | Hacker News Reader

These are called WinerLinks, as in Dave Winer from over at scripting.com. The Times started doing this in 2010, here are his thoughts: http://scripting.com/stories/2010/11/29/theNyTimesLeadsAgain...

More info here: http://scripting.com/stories/2010/11/30/winerlinksAndOutline...

Note, that on his blog, he uses a simple, tiny # character after each paragraph to allow direct linking. No shift key required.

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> tiny # character

... which is really annoying.

(edit) What I don't understand why he wouldn't show these # on hover over a respective paragraph.

Seriously. It's honestly one of the primary reasons I can't stand reading his stuff; each little hashmark is a reminder that the writer thinks his thoughts are so important you will want to quote them by chapter and verse, like a holy text.

Or an easy way to reference readers of your own material to any quotes you may use from him. This makes it a lot less time-consuming to link to his articles. Does this actually bring him more traffic? I don't know, but it's interesting to know that it's actually hurting his traffic from what you're saying.

Personally, I'd be more inclined to link to his article in my own because it's that much easier.

I believe the original name for them is Purple Numbers[1], though as Dave Winer mentions, the NYTs implementation doesn't appear to create the links properly.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_Numbers

No offense to Mr. Winer but if I thought for one moment people would call it this then I would never have been motivated to launch this code.

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