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Comment by michaelcampbell | Hacker News Reader

I thought I had seen the limits of the absurdity of this "footnote style" hyperlinks in HN. Now I'm certain of it.

Fair point :D I did it without much thinking but it certainly looks silly if I look at it now.

for real pretentiousness, it would be numbered from [0]

You're on a forum with a bunch of programmers and other computer people. It's not pretentious to number things the way that we number everything else.

What do you mean?

My guess is that replacing the two [1] with a : the end result would have been the same.

I wouldn't suppose that's meant to be taken personal.

It would be highly pretentious, I think you agree, if it were a normative standard. That's not the case, so it seems they got carried away in trying to be witty

It's a personal peeve, but I find the footnote style of putting in links, rather than inline like the web was intended, to be not only hard to read, but quite pretentious.

These are comments on some web resource, not research papers.

I don't see how it can be pretentious. Usually, I do it to avoid disturbing the flow of text reading.

To each their own I guess. But from another thread today, I'd much rather read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29955514 than https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29955106

I guess there's no accounting for taste.

(Or, perhaps meta:

I'd much rather read [1] than [2]. Too much bouncing around; I'm not even sure if it's worse when the text is large compared to the research paper citations, or small.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29955514

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29955106 )

For my part I much prefer your second variant here, especially when the URL has a long path or query string.

HN doesn't allow inline links like the web intended. So you either get footnote style or the raw link text (possibly with non-human-interpretable query parameters), and either way is hard to read and interrupts the flow of the text.

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