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A comment on Patent trolls now account for 67 percent of all new patent lawsuits. Parent comment

Re:Patent trolls now account for 67 percent of all new paten... by masklinn on Tuesday July 15, 2014 @03:09PM (#8038359)
This is nothing more (or less) than manual emulation for footnotes, which long predate PG.
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Re:Patent trolls now account for 67 percent of all new paten... by lolpep8 on Tuesday July 15, 2014 @03:31PM (#8038481)
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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Re:Patent trolls now account for 67 percent of all new paten... by masklinn on Wednesday July 16, 2014 @01:56AM (#8040751)
> 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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Re:Patent trolls now account for 67 percent of all new paten... by cheald on Tuesday July 15, 2014 @06:15PM (#8039431)
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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