Yes. I am over opinionated and prone to dramatic exaggeration. Point taken though, and I'll remove the TL;DR.

I also loved the TL;DR. My first impression wasn't "this guy is an asshole" it was "wow, it's refreshing to see someone openly reject idiots on their blog."

Maybe not idiots exactly, but I agree with the derision of short attention spans.

Please don't remove it. I hate to say it but... Haters gonna hate.

Keep the snark.

It's rather discombobulating at first, but then the point of the article indeed comes thru: if you're not going to read beyond a TL;DR then you're part of the problem.

You should remove it, but it's exemplary of the whole post. Bizarrely defensive and hostile over exaggerated, hypothetical or imagined slights.

Okay, by popular consent the TL:DR? remains as is. So do the punctuation errors. I'll leave the post alone. Either you like the content or hate the content. I admit the spelling and punctuation are not great, but then again I didn't expect anyone to actually read this.

After a little while I was able to move past the snark and start reading your post and I really like it, but the open automatically alienated every person that you are trying to reach. Everybody saying that they're glad you have it in there or that it's refreshing to see already gets your message.

By removing from the spectrum everybody that would actually benefit from reading this article it got changed into pointless a circle jerk for the tech community about how much "they" just don't get it.

It's a good article, but it's too bad that the people who need to read it will pass by it because of an opening.

No keep it. The whole tldr meme is nicely analogous to the point you are making.

The only things you are "snarky" about in the piece are entitled attitudes of people who want things that are mostly free to require no effort at all on their part. It's deserved and needs to be said, it's a disempowering attitude and it's important to discuss in a world that is more and more run by computers and software.

Love the post, and I'm with you 100% on this subject. Just thought I'd mention that the counteract the surprising, even for HN, amount of negativity in these comments.

I loved the TL;DR.

> "TL;DR? Why not just go watch another five second video of a kitten with it’s head in a toilet roll, or a 140 character description of a meal your friend just stuffed in their mouth. “num num”. This blog post is not for you."

But apt, ne? Lots of people are like that.

I was going to start reading the article, but the TL;DR dissuaded me. The article look to be a long one, and if I just committed to reading every long article on the internet I'd never get anything done. The beginning of the article should serve to get me interested and willing to invest the time to read the article, not as a snark remark to people who have already showed interest in your article by navigating to it. In the case that this is a reply to people asking for TL;DR on things you write: A tl;dr means that someone was interested in what you had to say enough to leave a comment. However you failed to show the worth of reading the article given the apparent size of it. You had the potential to get those who would start reading your article to see if it had value and told all of them to go waste their time.

This is true. Not only does he come off as off-putting to his readers, he also seemingly is off-putting to the rest of society.

On the contrary, the TL;DR encouraged me to read the article to the bottom. I don't get it why anyone (except the ones mentioned in this tl;dr) would be offended by this.

TLDR is a concession to terrible human beings. They deserve the snark.

The irony is that the article was summarized in the conclusion.

"I want the people who will help shape our society in the future to understand the technology that will help shape out society in the future. If this is going to happen, then we need to reverse the trend that is seeing digital illiteracy exponentially increase. We need to act together, as parents, as teachers, as policy makers. Lets build a generation of hackers. Who’s with me?"

I pressed back immediately after reading this opening. Not because I fall into the category of person the author describes but because I'm not bothered reading an article written by somebody who starts their blog posts by insulting their readers.

He insulted only the lazy, "don't make me think" part of the society, I always thought that HN readers are in the better half.

I have noticed most of the comments are harping on this. Too bad. (Not that I disagree.)

"num num" !!!! WTF, it's nom nom

if you're going to be snarky, at least be right.