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Comment by gerdesj | Hacker News Reader

At first it might look a bit pretentious: "Ok thickie, this will hurt your ordinary mind". However, on reflection, a warning that the writer has bothered to put their back into the job for a while is a great idea. When you see it, stop, put on the kettle, go out for a fag (cigarette) or whatever and then come back.

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Although Bourbaki was/were capable of being plenty pretentious, I think that it might seem less pretentious if read not as "from our lofty viewpoint, we can see that this is too tough for you," but rather as a very literal analogue of the road sign: "it's easy to get dangerous results if you traverse this territory without sufficient care."

I was taking the piss 8) I will definitely be deploying this symbol in some of my documentation.

Given I'm an IT bod: it will be the ones pertaining to name resolution and ... time.

> I will definitely be deploying this symbol in some of my documentation.

+1. Also curious to see where it should be positioned on the page. The wiki page says it goes in the margin. I tried searching github for 'u2621' to find examples but couldn't spot any rendered examples yet (only code).

Check out the TeXBook, eg. page 14.

Yeah, other possible reads:

- "brace yourself, here be dragons"

- "til now it was a bit of a treadmill, but that's a part you probably don't want to fast read"

- "on the surface this may look innocuous but there are tricky subtleties that you may not want to overlook"

  /*
   * You are not expected to understand this.
   */

why the addition to clarify your use of fag?

The word fag has multiple meanings across the various en_* variants, including cigarette and (a) gay.

Many readers hereabouts read English as a second language. It took me roughly two seconds to ensure that my meaning was spelled out. This response, rather longer 8)

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