Adding my voice to this. I know that the article was written in 2006, but still. If one wants to be taken seriously as a writer, one shouldn't insert puerile jokes for 12 year olds into their prose. It made me wince when when I read it, and I was ready to comment here about it, but GP got here first.

Tell that to Shakespeare and Chaucer.

Shakespeare and Chaucer were not writing technical documentation.

I was responding in jest to the narrow claim about not making puerile jokes if one wishes to be taken as a serious writer.

You shouldn’t get downvoted for that.

Welcome to Hacker News, please enjoy your stay. /s

Where people are either socialists or nazis, without a ton of middle ground so you’re likely to get downvoted no matter what you say.

Any article that assumes something about the reader is in some way discriminatory or is it just when it assumes that you're a man?

Generally, the accusation of "sexist" is used when someone is making unfair or irrelevant assumptions on the basis of sex. It is not generally leveled at technical documentation that assumes the reader has the technical background to read the documentation, for instance.

Technical documentation sometimes does contain humor, it's not that uncommon for developers to include jokes and easter eggs. Furthermore, this is listed under category "Poul-Hennings random outbursts", described as "You may or may not want to know what Poul-Henning thinks.". So while technically included in it, it's not really a documentation of anything. It's basically a blog post. And just like I don't find anything wrong about a blog about cosmetics or fashion assuming that the reader is a woman, I don't find anything wrong in a blog post about technology assuming that the reader is a man.

I propose the article branches at this point as a set of selectable tabs, each labeled over a suitable set of properties describing the reader, and then offering a matching joke when you click the tab.

Doesn't that still have the problem of categorizing the reader, being wildly off-topic from the technical content of the article and distracting the reader by making them wonder, at least a bit, if the technical content of the article is going to be different for them depending on who they are?

The joke barely makes sense in context. Is the physical size of the memory relevant to the point about memory-mapped views of disk - and is it a problem that the physical size of memory is smaller? Should one program an MP3 player the way described in this article, or not? What about USB flash drives (which one is likely to have in one's pocket, and which are roughly the same form factor as the other object alluded to here) - they're much slower than main disk and more likely to fail. Is this an intended reference to such memory devices, and in either case, how does the advice from the article apply to such devices?

The article would be better (more effective at communicating its point) without it.

OK, I propose then we replace the tabs with just a single link labeled "Please click here if you'd like a dick joke".

Then have more detailed tabs on a dedicated page.

You can make a dick joke without assuming the listener is the owner of a dick.

The conflict here is that a joke where you include the listener is automatically funnier, and a dick joke is also automatically funnier.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwGIHzR5r0Y

So the challenge lies in combining both, resulting in either the listener, or someone the listener is interacting with in the narrative having a dick.

It's one of the big unsolved problems of telling jokes online.