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Comment by 83yg49 | Hacker News Reader

[0] The way that [1] write is [2]

[1] you

[2] kind [3] weird.

[3] of

Please read the Hacker News guidelines[0] to see why people write in such a manner[1], good sir[2]!

[0] Paul Graham did it

[1] And everyone copied it here

[2] It's also way easier than putting the effort to weave these remarks into the text seamlessly

This is nothing more (or less) than manual emulation for footnotes, which long predate PG.

You must concede that they are particularly prevalent in this community, and that PG's essays are notorious for their abundance of footnotes.

Oh, and they are used as a substitute for the lack of hyperlink markup in HN, which makes them a necessity when linking sources in comments.

> You must concede that they are particularly prevalent in this community

Not particularly so when compared with e.g. mailing lists (those I frequent anyway) and usenet.

It's also standard Markdown for [links][0][1], which is arguably the lingua franca for nerds on the internet.

    [0] http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#link
    [1] see what I did there

Can you not tell the difference between a normal footnote and moving half of a sentence elsewhere?