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Comment by sdegutis | Hacker News Reader

So, on a related note, someone wrote a blog post a few years ago that just perfectly epitomized the annoyingly pretentious writing style everyone in the tech world seems to have, and I recommended to him that he use simpler phrases and words and sentences. Everyone in that chatroom criticized me as both an idiot and an asshole. Skip ahead a year or two, and PG writes the same fucking thing in a blog post and posts it here, and everyone praises him. What I took from this is that I'm not actually an idiot after all, and I should probably stop listening to people who say that I am.

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First of all, this isn't written by Paul Graham; it was written by Matt Might and posted by someone else entirely. Just because it got upvotes on Hackernews doesn't mean that PG was involved.

Secondly, there is a difference in context, timing and tone in an article like this. Here, a PhD supervisor is speaking generally about the sorts of errors his students tend to make.

In your situation, you were "attacking" a single person publicly. If you had had the social grace to make your comments privately and in person (rather than in a chatroom) they probably would have been better received.

If your takeaway from this post is just to "ignore the haters" then I'm afraid you're missing out on some real opportunity for self-improvement.

He was probably referring to this article.

http://paulgraham.com/talk.html

Yep that's exactly it. And I had the same thought of "this is the last straw" too that Paul's talking about there. I just got fed up with seeing everyone write like that, everywhere. Thanks for the link.

Social proof is a real cognitive bias and it applies to programmers too.

A chatroom mob got you that upset? You were just offering some advice. It is there problem if they choose to ignore it. Seriously dude, you should relax.

Can you provide an example of this style? thanks

I think the Soylent CEO's blog is an example of this, but I haven't really noticed it as a trend in the tech world.

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