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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure it's just a coincidence...

(It turns out if you want to write one-sentence essays, you have to attribute them to someone else.)

I should add that the first person to catch this was a guy called John Baldwin, who sent me an email about it in May 2008, but who agreed to keep it quiet.

If you want to kill the thread I can live with that. Or perhaps this is the answer to the social experiment you implicitly performed.

Too late for that. But it wasn't really a social experiment. I just wanted to say something that was only one sentence, and this seemed the most convenient way.

Only if everyone reading this thread commits to a vow of silence and in return pg (or should I say Tara?) agrees to take care of our children after we die.

More likely a way to get around the social stigma attached to quoting yourself.

If he put the same quote up, and attributed it to himself, people would pay less attention to the message and spend more time dealing with their feelings regarding this stigma.

Thankfully now we have Twitter, which is an acceptable medium to post witty things you come up with, and these witticisms are by default attributed to you.

It turns out if you want to write one-sentence essays, you have to attribute them to someone else.

At the risk of exposing myself as a fool, I have to ask-- why?

It would seem presumptuous.

It's socially acceptable for other people to excerpt individual sentences from things you write, but not to do this oneself.

It's interesting to think about why. Probably because it's so hard to get a useful idea into a single sentence that even trying to seems presumptuous.

I think quoting oneself is like talking about oneself in the third person... it's socially awkward.

Also the basic format of a quotation

  "words words words" - attribution

is like using bold/italics/underline all at once... conveying to the reader that you think this point is super critical/insightful. If you walked up to someone and said "listen to what I'm about to say because it's really insightful", I suspect it'd provoke the same reaction as quoting yourself in writing does.

Unfortunately, if you just write the one line you want to say, without acting like it's a quote at all, you have to rely on someone else to add the bold/italics/underline and pass it on. Also, it'd really stand out on your quotes page, not being in quotation marks and all. ;)

Very few people talk about themselves in the third person. And the only one that I can think of at this time is Bob Dole.

Also, you shouldn't name laws after yourself (except as a joke, and even that has become cliched).

The best way to have something named after yourself is to go with a really generic name (such as "automatic machine.") Then, people discussing your idea will often attach your name to it so that they can discuss it unambiguously. That's why they call it a Turing Machine, although Turing himself never did.

> It turns out if you want to write one-sentence essays, you have to attribute them to someone else.

Why?

Any chance she's related to nickb?

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