The root comment compiled perfectly. The grammar was understandable and the logic reasonably sound. The only deviations from the gold standard of natural English are: 1) "lol"; 2) ";]"; 3) lack of capitalization on some words. That is much closer to whitespace conventions than tossing brackets and semicolons all over the place.
I think #3 is the sticking point. I can read it, but a lifetime of reading has trained me to use capitalization past a period and space as a prompt to some sort of change. The lack of it makes a paragraph read like an unbroken sentence to me.
It slows me down considerably.
I'm not defending or agreeing with the complaint, just trying to find the reasoning behind one of the positions. I think people should step back and see what's actually bothering them about the writing (or if there's anything fundamentally bothersome at all).
I agree that the capitalization is a bit of a problem for the root, but at the same time I think SamReidHughes's reply was a vast overreaction. Looking back through the OP's comments per SamReidHughes's reference I agree they're not necessarily up to the HN prose standard but still nothing to go ballistic about.
To all of you - I'm used to capitalization (very much since I'm German and we capitalize every Noun), much less though do I know what to capitalize in English (I got so much angry comment in my phase of capitalizing everything i deemed important that I completely converted to an all-lower-case style).
I also know everything about punctuation, having taken two typing courses and one in standardized letter writing.
Despite all that, since I'm using CamelCase a lot and my shift keys have suffered from that so much that I have to press them forcedly, I try to limit their use whereever possible (this location just opted out of it ;).
