[raganwald]

Not in the minority, but here’s the thing. As long as this was primarily in our community, I was comfortable with a wee bit of ambiguity. Hackers and others are perfectly capable of doing a little fact-checking such as looking at my online resume or noticing that I write a lot of stuff like this.

Perhaps one in a hundred or even thousand people reading it might have thought it was real.

But once it escaped our cozy little echo-chamber, it went to a place where many people thought it was real. They aren’t part of a culture that expects parables and satire. They have no familiarity with my existing blow-hardiness on the subject of hiring programmers or privacy. It’s not as reasonable for me to expect that J. Random Facebookfriend will read it and assume it’s a parable.

So, it seemed like the right thing to do to issue a clarification.

tl;dr: An item on the front page of HN doesn’t need a clarification, an item on the front page of Reddit does.

[saurik]

In my experience, it has not been possible to predict the audience of such things ahead of time: in fact, it is the things where the most audience-specific assumptions are made that end up (I believe due to those specific assumptions) ending up in the most surprising and irritating of places.