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Comment by smlacy | Hacker News Reader

Is this writing style the new millennial version of leetspeak or something?

I find it extremely immature sounding, very grating, not funny at all.

Subcultures always have a lingua franca for themselves. For example, people regularly browsing HN do their best to sound as pedantic as possible at all times.

Wait I thought that was in the rules.

Well actually, those are called guidelines.

You should look up the guy who built YOLO (an object detector with 1700 citations).

His papers: https://pjreddie.com/media/files/papers/YOLOv3.pdf

and his resume: https://pjreddie.com/static/Redmon%20Resume.pdf

are all written in this style.

Lol, That resume is something. This guy is the equivalent of some medieval robin hood who can talk the talk then back it up with the walking of the walk.

Speaking as a millennial regularly using a handful of different social media apps, I don't feel like the writing style is particularly out-of-the-ordinary

That's the trouble with cultural axioms.

If it was meant ironically, then it was funny. Otherwise, it's disturbing.

Working as desigigned, if you are An Old.

If it's a new millennial anything, it's the sarcastic/ironic way people talk when trying to get across that they really don't care that much about whatever it is they're doing.

I've seen that kind of humorous/nonsensical code and comments before on small projects that are made mostly as a throwaway tool, or projects that are an intentionally poor example of how to implement something for laughs.

“Made mostly as a throwaway tool” pretty much hits the nail on the head. (I’m a twitter friend of Elias’ who saw how it went down.) Heaven forbid someone would amuse themself while hacking together a script for a friend.

Your blog 404s bud

So?

You're tone-policing a person of color's jokey style in a jokey project under the guise of professionalism and you can't keep your own blog that you link from HN and GitHub up.

You are the personification of why a lot of people don't like this community.

Agreed, but a millennial can be over 30 years old. This sounds like they're emulating a 10 year old trying to be edgy.

I just took it as self-deprecation.

More importantly, what cultural influences lead to this style of communication?

It normalizes a non-deterministic software universe with lowered expectations of correctness.

I believe the cultural influence is called "having a sense of humor"

Here is a linguistic precedent, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2005-07-20/features/05071...

”Few words have raised the ire of language purists the way the quotative "like" has in the years since "Clueless." Any tirade about the state of the language is sure to say something about "like" as a plague on the language ... "Older people have always criticized new words and [ways of speaking]," Fought says. "Go back to the 1950s to `scram' and `be cool,' and people were saying, `The youth are ruining the language.' I'm sure if you go back to Shakespeare's time, people were saying, `sooth sounds so bad, you really should say forsooth.'"

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