

How To Write The Perfect Meta Article - DanielBMarkham
http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2011/01/how-to-write-th.php

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JonnieCache
In this situation, as a smug HN reader you may want to make a comment that
mirrors the form of the article in a way that you find clever but is in fact
irritating.

The best way to achieve this is to go one level up on the meta-ladder, and to
write a meta-comment, that is, a comment about comments.

However that would be self-indulgent to the point of solipsism, so I advise
against it. At least I think it would be. Let me just ask the next djinn above
me...

~~~
hugh3
With your "next djinn above me" comment you have implicitly already laid claim
to the infinite chain of additional rungs on the meta-ladder on top of your
comment. And you did it in the very first comment of the thread.

I don't see how anybody can possibly go more meta than that.

------
jerf
I've been tempted to write "Top Ten Articles Containing Ten Reasons Top Ten
Lists are Bad".

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I've been meaning for some time to write an article on procrastination.

~~~
jerf
If that's a friendly snark about how I haven't written it, the reason is that
the joke is basically the title; actually writing it doesn't add much to the
joke. A little bit from actually finding ten such articles, but not enough to
warrent the effort.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
No snark intended. I got the joke. Just trying to reply in the meta and
recursive spirit of the article. Like yours, my title is the joke. Nothing
more to add.

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edw519
OK, Daniel, I see where this is going...

Last week: "Roll Your Own LinkBait Tech Headline"

This week: "How to Write the Perfect Meta Article"

Next week: "Ask HN: Review my start-up BlogPostGenerator.com"

~~~
DanielBMarkham
After swombat's article today on writing articles for startups I tweet
"Swombat! Keep this up and I'll write an article on how to write meta
articles"

I had to do it. It was a triple-dog dare.

He now threatens to write an article on how to make fun of meta articles, but
I don't think he has it in him.

Meanwhile for those of you who think we do this instead of working, I've been
pounding away at writing a custom Data Access Layer in F# and MySql. It's
going to do some cool stuff, and I look forward to blogging about it. But the
reason it's cool, ugh, is that, you guessed it, it works at the meta level.

So I had meta on the brain today and this was just a good way to blow off some
frustration.

