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Comment by post_below | Hacker News Reader

After seeing this I reread the post you're replying to. I don't see the pretention.

Pretentious: adjective. characterized by assumption of dignity or importance, especially when exaggerated or undeserved: a pretentious, self-important waiter. making an exaggerated outward show; ostentatious. full of pretense or pretension; having no factual basis; false.

If you're suggesting that their analysis is false, you should probably point out why. The self importance part I'm not seeing. Aren't they just stating the facts as they see them?

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The "really clever design" as noted by simonw was called "nothing fancy at all" by ComputerGuru, and that haveibeenpwned's API design "hasn’t done anything remotely ingenious", this is what made the comment pretentious. (in this case it doesn't matter wether he is or not factually correct)

The reply could very well be interpreted as "You think that Kk-Anonymity is fancy? How primitive of you. This way is the natural way of doing that thing and I would know because I'm the smartest person in the room. Oh by the way I dislike people who are pretentious."

You're mis-representing, because nowhere did ComputerGuru say what you're claiming you quoted, of HIBP.

The not-remotely ingenious part was regarding Cloudflare.

Consider the possibility that those of us who found it pretentious aren't lying, and that you not seeing it is perhaps more related to how you personally see things.

Now you're mis-representing my comment, I didn't anywhere discuss whether or not it was pretentious, I just pointed out that the comment was factually incorrect.

Why did you do that then?

I’m sorry if that’s how you understood it. This is not about the HIBP api but rather the braggadocio in Cloudflare’s post. I meant “they are purposely obscuring how obvious and intuitive their solution is behind all this math so they can seem extra smart, and it’s a shame because it would have been a better and more actually educative post if it just said ‘we did something very obvious and maybe you can just as easily do the same to your own data without being a math geek and it’s no big deal at all that we did, but here’s how we did it anyway.’”

Phrases like "honestly", "nothing fancy", "glorified", "any cs student" all convey (at least to this native English speaker) that whatever is being discussed is being looked down upon.

Sometimes it's the only way to look at things...

Right, so the post could be called "dismissive". It's hard to see it as openly glorifying anything though, so the charge of pretentiousness only works of one adopts some extra context.

If you assume that everyone who is dismissive is actually wrong and just pretending to know stuff, then I guess being dismissive is pretentious.

The analysis might not be false - but it sure is dismissive. Dismissiveness that jars with the stated dislike of 'pretension' and that makes the poster sound pretentious themselves.

You seem to be saying that one cannot be sure of ones own position and not be pretentious, is that what you mean?

No. What I’m trying to say is that any comment on a public forum does not exist in a vacuum and acquires additional properties based on where and when it is posted.

Uh... then you should probably edit your post, because I find it impossible to read this more general statement in the first post.

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