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It could be that your TL;DR has exactly the same content as [the first paragraph of] TFA, so it adds nothing to the conversation, the way a good summary of a co
by natep 15y ago
It could be that your TL;DR has exactly the same content as [the first paragraph of] TFA, so it adds nothing to the conversation, the way a good summary of a complex topic would.
Edit: forgot some words
- SoftwareMaven 15y agoThat's kind of the very definition to "TL;DR". Personally, I think they are an atrocity, because if everything useful in an article could be distiller to a tweet, it should have been a tweet and not an article that made it to the front page of HN. I don't downvoted them, though (unless highly inaccurate), because they may provide use to some people in deciding whether TFA is worth spending their time on.
- dsr_ 15y agoA distilled TL;DR is, as you say, either useless or an indication that the article is unworthy. I prefer the commentary form of TL;DR which is a pithy remark that allows people who are already familiar with the subject to learn what biases or novel facts this article displays. For example, consider the fictitious article: Are Human Ears High Resolution Signal Detectors? which discusses a study of microphones, digital audio recordings and double-blind human subjects trying to distinguish signal in high-noise environments. A useful TL;DR might be: Human ears suck. which might be a useful indicator of whether you're going to learn anything new from reading it.
- geoffw8 15y agoI have to tell you, I love TL;DR's, maybe I've got a form of digital ADHD but I just want to get the content in a quick, bitesize chunk. Especially when its something like this that I'm not particularly passionate about. Standing up for TL;DR's in general, not the OP's.
- natep 15y agoWhoops, yes. The original wording of my comment was the definition of TL;DR. The point I was trying to make is that in this case, the first paragraph of TFA was its own TL;DR, so GGP was particularly redundant.