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Hype on HackNews and Silicon Valley

One of the consequences of refusing to drink the in vogue kool-aid is that you remain sober and take in the full brunt of the silliness going on around you.

The technology industry overflows with such silliness, like any credible geek I spend too much time reading HackerNews even when I don't want to.

One odd phenomenon I have observed over the past few years is the fact that there is a rather peculiar writing style in Silicon Valley, seemingly meant to make writing more efficient in conveying hype.

Specifically, the desire to create emphasis when otherwise the point being made is prosaic has lead people in Silicon Valley to come up with this odd writing style where adverbs are deployed in ways that no decent writer would. Let's just say a good chunk of "influencers" in SV suffer from Hype-Nitis.

I have gleefully collected a small sample of these gems on HackerNews over the past couple of years:

atrociously bad
crucially important
astonishingly successful
growingly wants to be secular
closely involved and crucially helpful
severely unique and an incredible thing to witness
Something is dramatically wrong with her
It is an exceptionally great salary
early decline are vastly significant 
made an amazingly interesting point
It was a hugely important quarter
You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.
team massively grew
the hugely important and popular site
startup to a significantly larger organization
hugely newsworthy figure
This is insanely sad. This brilliant woman had so much left to share with us.
The OP is impressively throrough 
informatively good

*Updated 2023*

 VuePress is impressively easy
This is a phenomenally good resource
This was exceptionally immaturely handled
forced to use the atrociously terrible
be taking this crisis gravely seriously
but that's drastically untrue
but it's vastly useful, and surprisingly versatile
massively better than Teams
is amazingly perfect for
startlingly worse case
so massively improperly run and managed
day of massively lost customer trust
The blog post is greatly interesting
This can massively simplify the technology estate
would meaningfully damage public discourse
How to Write Usefully
the tool makes it deadly simple to use!
I'm horrendously worried about crypto
lightning fast and trivially easy
decently interesting
you are extremely subject to the whims
is radically impressive
remarkably closer to profitability
infinitely faster and more straightforward
amazingly impressive as always
doesn’t seem exceptionally promising
account is stunningly probably very accurate
crappiness is unexplainably funny
but growth is substantially dead
sentiment has massively shifted
being massively adapted in the near future
These are distinctly different tasks
I maybe hugely mistaken but
they massively shifted their allocation
are wonderfully small,
WFH was massively better
Smells deeply bad.
the withdrawal of substantially all uninsured deposits

MASSIVELY decrease our home values, the quality of life of ourselves and our neighbors and IMMENSELY increase the noise pollution and traffic.”
We used to do that (certainly to a massively greater extent than we do now)

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