You're right. I shouldn't have attacked your blog article like that, and I apologize.

I maintain, however, that people without sufficient background in music theory have a right to complain (on HN, not on your blog) it's quite incomprehensible. And that it could have been written to better accommodate for that. Not that you have any obligation to, as you said it's a personal blog post where you can write whatever you want, however you want :)

Though personally, if you would put in a few links to some simple introductory articles--maybe the other commenters were right and it just takes 10 mins of reading the right definitions of notation, maybe I just read the wrong things before or forgot the important parts--that would have definitely triggered me to explore some more of the subject matter, and you can't disagree that would have been a good thing ;-)

Strongly disagree, there is a vast array of articles covering a vast array of subjects on HN. Part of the joy of browsing it is finding articles on subjects I know little about and then doing some work to get my deficient knowledge up to scratch to gain the most from them. You sound like a university professor that insists you start from the basics in every essay so that anyone can read your work. If you want to read 1 music theory article with no reference to anything else then you need to start at music theory 101. BTW if you do want to understand what is going on here read something about building chords with thirds (and get to the point where you get that a third on a third is a 5th if everything is diatonic) - for the record i h ave had no formal training in music theory and have learnt everything from the internets from articles far worse and self contradictory than this. Now im going to go back to reading things about haskell and startups - things i know very little about btw and have to work to understand. Why would you want to read about things you already understand?