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Comment by esonica | Hacker News Reader

I wish I had some idea what you're talking about? Can someone fill me in with some context?

Audrey sometime (couple of days) ago joined the #padre channel with a username user6209 or something like that. The maintainer of Padre was both helpful and courteous to this user who was asking for some help/pointers without knowing that this was Audrey Tang, the maker of Pugs and a big name in the Perl community.

The guy in question here "asdgasd", did almost the same thing after reading that article presumably which made its rounds on Reddit and HN. However his/her talk was bordering on trolling unlike Audrey's in the same channel.

Understood. But because the commentary is so poorly written, it would probably make more sense if the conversation from the channel had simply been printed as-is. Hard to believe this was written by someone of note in the programming community.

That's strangest. I found it one of the warmest and most rewarding internet-related pieces I'd read in a long while. It made a few assumptions about your understanding of the context but, goddamit, someone is entitled to do that on their own blog!

Lack of context happens when someone isn't targetting the various aggregators in their post.

I find it refreshing actually. It's nice to read a post once in a while that eschews the preamble/genericity that typically accompanies posts that are designed to be voted up somewhere or other.

It is part of a larger conversation, and references the other parts of the conversation; blogs used to do that a lot, and the folks who've been doing it for a while tend to still do so on a regular basis. It definitely made sense to me. It can be hard to follow IRC chat logs, since there's so much said between the lines in such an environment (any insular community will tend to develop shorthand and a pidgin; IRC is probably an extreme example of that)...but I thought it was reasonably well explained, if you don't try too hard to understand all the trollish undertones and in-jokes.

If you read the referred-to posts at the top of it, I suspect it will all make more sense. It did to me, and while I -am- a perl-head I'm not on #padre

However "poorly written" isn't really a useful response - I'm sure audrey would welcome some constructive criticism either here or as a comment to the blog post itself.

I'll admit the post was rather stream of consciousness and wandered back and forth a bit, but I happen to quite enjoy that style from time to time; the trick, I think, is to remember that a discussion of personal enjoyment and social interactions is a very different beast to a technical article and adjust your approach to reading accordingly.

Seriously though, if you have concerns about the writing, elaborate - the "hard to believe" part runs quite close to the sort of attack pg's "how to criticise" stuff abhors but if you were able to make sense of it -in spite- of the writing rather than -because- of it there must be something more than "poorly written" that you can contribute on the topic ...

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