Hah, learned about the existence of this documentary just 3 days ago while researching how .zips work[0]. The last episode is supposedly about Phil Katz, co-inventor of the format and kind of a tragic figure.
Fun fact: Due to their structure, the first two bytes of many .zips are 0x50 4B, or PK–his initials–in ASCII.
Hey! First of all: don't worry, it didn't make me feel bad–don't know about others though, of course. And I really meant what I said: I think you knew your (originally) intended audience, and there, the percentage of people is almost certainly quite a lot higher than among general HN readership. I just really like that comic and immediately had to think of it when I read that sentence. (And it's only made funnier by your intention, it really shows how true to life the comic actually is!)
But I think there is a good, general argument to be made against these kinds of sentences. I don't think anyone would ever blame you for writing about a well known thing, while at the same time there is a chance of needlessly making people feel bad.
BUT I also think that with the right "mindset", these kinds of sentences can be a good indicator to readers about what is considered essential, common knowledge among a certain group of people.
So ... I don't think you need to remove it, but wouldn't say it's bad if you did. Sorry for the long winded way of saying basically nothing.
"I think it's quite well known that on a 64-bit system, the maximum bit-width
of a virtual address is somewhat lower (commonly 48-bits)." might actually be a perfect example of the Average Framiliarity xkcd[0]. It's perfectly fine to write it that way and the article obviously knows its intended audience. But I'm wondering what percentage of readers here actually knew this beforehand. (I learned it only pretty recently myself. And yes, I should have known this sooner, but ... didn't.)
Haha, thanks for your reply and for understanding where I'm coming from. And while your original comment might not be a _direct_ reply to OPs question, I would've hoped for it to be far more upvoted as well, as it's easily one of the most valuable comments in this thread in my opinion. HN truly is weird sometimes.
The only thing I took issue with in your original comment was the "The number of gotchas in this simple 3-step process is insane" and the "there are so many gotchas" parts, as I think that this exact wording made me read the whole thing in a wrong way. I just wish we would tell people new to these kinds of topics "Don't fear this, this is normal, but totally manageable! It might seem like a minefield at first, but actually, there's a very well-trodden path through it. Here's (part of) the map." (Basically,you provided that map, which is great, and more than people genrally do, but the wording above made the map seem more daunting than I would wish.)
Actually, I think we're doing a huge disservice to our profession as programmers when we call stuff like this "an insane number of gotchas". This is no critique of you or your post specifically, mind you, and I know where you're coming from. But it's a critique of a general tendency among programmers to call anything that requires a bit of knowledge and thought beyond the simplest surface level solution "complex" or "insane to implement on your own". It's not. While I know that you're list of gotchas isn't exhaustive, the real list is not so much longer that it's not perfectly reasonable to expect someone to be able to implement it correctly.
I say that as someone who was on the "receiving end" of this kind of advice for years btw. I always thought that the things that are "better left to libraries" are really arcane and impossible to understand, which only lead to confusion and an inability to truly assess options. And it's really just a matter of semantics and framing. It would be perfectly reasonable to say "it's not complex as long as you keep this reasonably long list of gotchas in mind".
My point is that recommendations that are based on social networks become less and less useful as that network grows. And LT seems to have hit the perfect size for its recommendations to be useful. I'm actively dreading the day that they either get worse (i.e. the network gets too big), or that LT goes away entirely because it has no place in the modern internet anymore, multiple times a week, to the point where I'm thinking about ways to preserve its current form in some way or another.
If more people would be on there it wouldn't be as useful too anyone anymore, instead of being as useful to more people. So instead of gatekeeping it's more like preservation of something that would otherwise vanish. Librarything is basically one of the few national parks the internet has left.
Finally, and maybe most importantly, my original comment was really meant as a light-hearted comment on the magic of LT with some of the thoughts I have on the matter sprinkled in. But I should've known that HN would interpret it in the least favorable way.
Psss. Please don't ruin Librarything by getting more people on there. Its recommendation algorithm is pure perfection—basically magic—and I fear it's mostly because it's only used by a very particular group of people.
I actually wondered about this on Twitter recently[1]. Do you remember caring about/recognizing the aesthetics of some of these ads at the time, or is that more of a modern perspective?
But I needed something simpler that I could throw on a second screen while working. So I built myself Breather! Maybe it will help some of you as well. :)
Basically, I had a huge list of books I haven't gotten around to reading about technology, its history and its relationship to society. So I thought: why not make a book club out of it?
Getting people to sign up for a community that really isn't one yet is hard and I'll have to see how it goes. But if a few people here take the chance I would be beyond happy!
Fun fact: Due to their structure, the first two bytes of many .zips are 0x50 4B, or PK–his initials–in ASCII.
[0] https://indieweb.social/@jonasmerlin/111617397581024775