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Comment by kahawe | Hacker News Reader

> "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.

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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.

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

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