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Comment by psobot | Hacker News Reader

Every post from patio11 is such a joy to read: precise, exact, descriptive, and entertaining. I'd love to understand where his writing style comes from and how to emulate it.

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The true answer, which may not be useful, is that style is what happens when one writes five million words. For the first few hundred thousand you end up sounding a lot like your favorite authors and what your teachers wanted. Then you start doubling down on what is working, try random experiments, bounce around an incentive gradient a bit, and also accumulate a decade plus of life experience and hopefully some knowledge. Eventually, people start sounding like you. There is no day in the middle where you hire a focus group of writing professionals to develop a house style guide.

That is a joke but not much of one; writing style guides to capture "What is... taste? How do we scale it?" is a project I've actually been involved with. This project brief has defeated many talented people, the least of which being me.

Agree, It's the perfectly balanced between "too dry/academic", or "too vague/gimmicky".

It's often mentionned in HN, but in the same style, I cannot recommend enough "Money stuff" [1] which is Matt Levine's newsletter at Bloomberg. Highly entertaining.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-02-06/musk-g...

I think it's a witty and knowing but rather opaque writing style that's designed to make you work. Often worth the effort, but he could use an editor or beta tester to help dial it back a bit.

There were a few times when I almost sent him a tweet that he got some logic backwards, but after rereading, I realized that I had misread it, that it's right but confusing.

I hope to hire an editor one of these days, but some of my characteristic style is intentional and some is just a reflection that the production function is "Crikey I've put the kids to bed and now have checks watch four hours to write prior to my effective deadline."

Maybe it's because English is not my native language, but I had a very hard time to get the gist of both articles. I'm not even sure I have learned something concrete about KYC/AML. The only take away I have is that it's a deliberately opaque set of rules and that neither the regulator nor the banks have a complete picture of what is actually going on in the financial system. And that it's leaky as hell.

But maybe that is all the author tried to convey to the reader, just in an opaque way :)

I really hope he compiles these blogposts into a book. There is so much nuanced industry knowledge here.

> I'd love to understand where his writing style comes from and how to emulate it.

In the "good old days" they made students memorize passages from great authors and reproduce them. The idea being that this process will force you to think about the structure of their sentences and vocabulary. I used to do this when I was a kid, but I don't think I did it enough to have an impact.

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