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by lolpep8 4350 days ago
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
1 comments
masklinn 4350 days ago
This is nothing more (or less) than manual emulation for footnotes, which long predate PG.
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lolpep8 4350 days ago
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.

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masklinn 4349 days ago
> 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.

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cheald 4350 days ago
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
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