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Comment by hxa7241 | Hacker News Reader

The other important thing needed is:

Make your message concrete and specific.

It is no use reading a first sentence that says something like: "We created a novel abstraction to improve software development.". Yes, it is concise, but it says nothing. "We used wavelet analysis to find and factor-out the most modified aspects of our code." -- that I can see I want to know more about.

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I actually kind of find myself often wanting the opposite, especially in the first sentence or two of a paper's abstract. If the first sentence has details about their method, I'm often still trying to figure out of it's even on the broad subject I'm looking for. Your first example would let me say, "oh ok, their goal here was improving software development, not what I was looking for", without being distracted by details about wavelets.

It is true that some useful information is missing from a specific statement, but I would probably expect much of it would be supplied by the context of where or how you found the document . . .

hm, wavelet analysis on (source) code... strange notion, and intriguing.

i've long thought that language is a fine tool to deliberately construct notions beyond our horizon.

composing such nonsense sentences feel like fuzzing the brain's pattern recognition.

You might enjoy the topic of the Professor's symposium in the "Futurological Congress", by Stanislaw Lem.

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