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Footnotes are useful to not break the flow of a thought with text that isn't meant to be read. Also, because of the link included at the end of a sentence, you

Footnotes are useful to not break the flow of a thought with text that isn't meant to be read. Also, because of the link included at the end of a sentence, you were not able to include the conventional full stop immediately after the last character of the sentence.

fsckboy 5y ago
we're going off topic here, but i always feel like comments like yours assume that I'm a complete idiot and don't know anything and need to be told something obvious :) what you say is so obvious, I'd prefer that you read your comment first as representing the generally held wisdom I'm arguing against, and then interpret my comment as a riposte to that. My point was that, and this applies to printed books also, what breaks up flow for me is to go searching for footnotes which by their nature are any place but handy. I'm a detail oriented person, and I want the illumination that extra detailed footnotes provide, and it doesn't distract me at all from what I'm reading--and especially not distracting with regard to a highlighted link your comment about the missing full stop points out exactly what I'm talking about: you give primacy to the rules of punctuation over the interesting thoughts being conveyed, the unique, human, creative part. I'll bet you just love C's semicolons? (actually, I do love C's semicolons, because I speak C, but I use it as an example because the average person finds them infuriating... and in any case, I actually LOVE when inserting an URL into text frees me from having to add a full stop someplace, whose purpose adds nothing to the information, it's simply a notional convenience to separate one notion from another) <-- see, that R-paren frees me from having to include a period! <-- but the exclamation is required and I threw in an em-dash up there to show that I also find emdashes--like this--much less distracting than parentheses (parentheses really make the aside take over your train of thought) in terms of figuring out where you are in the original paragraph (omg, downvotes for the most interesting thing you've read all day, something that points out a number of things you never thought of before? pioneers always die of arrows in the back!)
- tastyfreeze 5y ago
  I made no assumptions of your competency. What I said was obvious to me but, your comment indicated that you didn't understand why people use footnotes on HN. To effectively communicate ideas to the largest number of people it is necessary to follow conventions. Bucking convention reduces your possible audience size.
  - fsckboy 5y ago
    I think have higher standards for obviousness than you. My comment did not indicate that I don't understand footnotes, not here nor in books, that was something you read in. In fact, my comment indicated facility with the subject. A person unfamiliar with footnotes wouldn't even know to call them footnotes, and a person unfamiliar with how they are used on HN would not say "(a) I disagree with how they are used and (b) because links are highlighted to stand out they are not a distraction". What I just wrote there is obvious to me, why not to you? nobody knows at the beginning of a comment whether later in the comment conventions are going to be bucked, and I highly doubt in a 4 line comment whether inline links or footnoted links are going to make a difference to audience size, i mean seriously!
- ifdefdebug 5y ago
  You call it the most interesting thing I've read all day, I call it boring bikeshedding, but I won't downvote it regardless.
ghaff 5y ago
I really like being able to use footnotes, which unfortunately don't work well with Kindle-style flowing text. I find it useful to explain some concept that most readers probably know, to bulletproof ("yes, I'm well aware there are one or two edge cases but they're really not relevant in general. Let's move on."), historical digressions that aren't important to the general point, and references. (Of course, if it's only references, those work fine as end notes.)
ThalesX 5y ago
It also helps for comments with multiple links to have a footer with all of them.
phist_mcgee 5y ago
Pedantic, off-topic comments also break conversational flow.

fsckboy 5y ago

we're going off topic here, but i always feel like comments like yours assume that I'm a complete idiot and don't know anything and need to be told something obvious :) what you say is so obvious, I'd prefer that you read your comment first as representing the generally held wisdom I'm arguing against, and then interpret my comment as a riposte to that. My point was that, and this applies to printed books also, what breaks up flow for me is to go searching for footnotes which by their nature are any place but handy. I'm a detail oriented person, and I want the illumination that extra detailed footnotes provide, and it doesn't distract me at all from what I'm reading--and especially not distracting with regard to a highlighted link your comment about the missing full stop points out exactly what I'm talking about: you give primacy to the rules of punctuation over the interesting thoughts being conveyed, the unique, human, creative part. I'll bet you just love C's semicolons? (actually, I do love C's semicolons, because I speak C, but I use it as an example because the average person finds them infuriating... and in any case, I actually LOVE when inserting an URL into text frees me from having to add a full stop someplace, whose purpose adds nothing to the information, it's simply a notional convenience to separate one notion from another) <-- see, that R-paren frees me from having to include a period! <-- but the exclamation is required and I threw in an em-dash up there to show that I also find emdashes--like this--much less distracting than parentheses (parentheses really make the aside take over your train of thought) in terms of figuring out where you are in the original paragraph (omg, downvotes for the most interesting thing you've read all day, something that points out a number of things you never thought of before? pioneers always die of arrows in the back!)

tastyfreeze 5y ago
I made no assumptions of your competency. What I said was obvious to me but, your comment indicated that you didn't understand why people use footnotes on HN. To effectively communicate ideas to the largest number of people it is necessary to follow conventions. Bucking convention reduces your possible audience size.
- fsckboy 5y ago
  I think have higher standards for obviousness than you. My comment did not indicate that I don't understand footnotes, not here nor in books, that was something you read in. In fact, my comment indicated facility with the subject. A person unfamiliar with footnotes wouldn't even know to call them footnotes, and a person unfamiliar with how they are used on HN would not say "(a) I disagree with how they are used and (b) because links are highlighted to stand out they are not a distraction". What I just wrote there is obvious to me, why not to you? nobody knows at the beginning of a comment whether later in the comment conventions are going to be bucked, and I highly doubt in a 4 line comment whether inline links or footnoted links are going to make a difference to audience size, i mean seriously!
ifdefdebug 5y ago
You call it the most interesting thing I've read all day, I call it boring bikeshedding, but I won't downvote it regardless.

ghaff 5y ago

I really like being able to use footnotes, which unfortunately don't work well with Kindle-style flowing text. I find it useful to explain some concept that most readers probably know, to bulletproof ("yes, I'm well aware there are one or two edge cases but they're really not relevant in general. Let's move on."), historical digressions that aren't important to the general point, and references. (Of course, if it's only references, those work fine as end notes.)

ThalesX 5y ago

It also helps for comments with multiple links to have a footer with all of them.

phist_mcgee 5y ago

Pedantic, off-topic comments also break conversational flow.