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Comment by Lagged2Death | Hacker News Reader

You are the victim of branch prediction fail.

"Failure" is a perfectly serviceable word and the cutesy "fail" is just annoying in a technical discussion like this.

When I see colloquialisms used in technical discussions I generally assume that the author is attempting to convey the topic of conversation in a more casual and approachable way so as to maximize the amount of of people who read and think about what is being said. You may not be aware of this but pretentiousness does turn a lot of people off. This stops said people from inquiring further about things they may actually discover they care about. The downside of all this pretentiousness is that the world is as a whole less educated because the people who possess the knowledge and know-how refuse to accommodate their audiences with simple word changes such as this.

There's nothing pretentious about the word "failure."

I do not believe the people who plod through a huge multi-page, multi-code-sample question at StackOverflow are just casual dabblers who are likely to leap away from the discussion when they discover the top-rated answer features the word "failure."

I suspect that you also believe that you are not being pretentious and pedantic by raising this point. I emphatically disagree. The latter half of the criticism raised in my comment was directed towards your initial comment and comments or explanations like yours that are prevalent in advanced fields. I apologize for not being clear.

I'm sorry, but I got turned off from reading the rest of your comment when I got to "emphatically." Maybe you should change it to "like totally." To accommodate me.

like totally noted, dude! :)

I didn't read "fail" there as being cutesy/meme-y. I [think I] heard people use the term "branch prediction fail" many years before "FAIL!" became "a thing".

That anyone would grok less word salad resulting from cutesyhood is dubious, bro.

> "fail" is just annoying in a technical discussion

I am sorry but you know what is REALLY annoying? Nit-picking at what must be the atomic level considering the depth and detail of this perfectly brilliant reply.

Technical discussions need a LOT more people like Alexander Yee aka "Mysticial" - and technical discussions sure as hell do not need ANY people like you complaining about the choice of words or slang as long as it is perfectly clear and understandable for the target audience and on that account he more than delivered.

word, kahawe, you just said what I was thinking.

Nit-picking at what must be the atomic level considering the depth and detail of this perfectly brilliant reply.

Can't have it both ways. The more depth and detail a discussion tries to present, the more important it is to get the details right. The medium (StackExchange) even recognizes this and has editing, correcting, and collaborative fixing built into its DNA, for that very reason.

The more famous this response becomes, the more ESL readers there will be. Why trip them up this way? There's just no reason to use "fail" like this here.

"Branch prediction fail" is not actually a very clear or precise phrase. It could mean the failure of a single branch prediction attempt; it could mean the failure of the technique in a particular case, and it could refer to an author's opinion that it was a failure in general. Why muddy the waters?

You are being pedantic to an extreme I haven't even encountered amongst the worst "grammar nazis" and you are using nothing but FUD arguments. So his reply was "muddied" up by that? The amount of upvotes and comments and people linking to the reply very strongly beg to differ. It is a brilliant reply and I am not a native speaker, even I understood it perfectly well too so he must have done something right.

You do not have a single reason to complain and the sooner you realize that, the better it will be for your own sake.

So, to recap: I voiced my irritation at a particular word choice, and the conclusions are:

1) I am therefore worse than the Nazis

2) I'm the one who's being unreasonable

3) If something is popular it follows that it is also perfect and cannot be improved in any way.

Thanks for clearing that up.

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