chuckadams

Most successful bank heists are in and out in less than five minutes. Or were anyway, there's a reason you don't hear about them these days.

> I think the HN/web forum ethos of "a comment should stand on its own" has been a grave mistake, as this strips the surrounding context from what someone is saying.

I get what you mean about quoting something out of context, but I always read the intent of that guideline as the opposite: that a reply should quote enough of the original to provide the context. Really only needed near the top of long/deep threads where the reply might be multiple screens below the nested replies above it. Summarizing also works, which always risks misinterpretation, but it's also good to get that interpretation out in the open (again assuming good faith).

One thing I still can't stand reading is the usenet-era "point-for-point" style that interleaves a sentence or two of quote alternating with response, back and forth for the whole post. It's not only noisy, it tends toward a very snippy tone as well.

Huh, that makes more sense, thanks. Whodathunk that The Simpsons wasn't an authority on translation? Let down again... :-/

I'm old enough to remember candy cigarettes.

Schadenfreude literally means "shameful joy", so it's kind of built into the word itself. Someone who doesn't feel at least a little tinge of wrongness is someone who's broken.

Hanna Arendt coined the best term of all for it: The Banality of Evil.

No who remembers WAP has any desire to see anything like it return. A 'lite' subdomain is far easier and more effective by not trying to reinvent the entire stack.

As for WML, I'd say transport-level compression made that pretty much academic.

The "But" and the quotes suggest that the GP reply might be sarcastic?

Poe's Law in action I guess.

"It's life, Jim, but not as we know it."

On Apple devices it's L4/Darwin, aka "sepOS".

Agreed. There was frequently a better answer that was ranked lower, but the top one was rarely actually wrong. SO had a litany of failings, but that wasn't one of them.

"We're not answering your question because it has words another question has, you're wrong for saying it doesn't answer your question, and you're wrong for thinking we were wrong."

That's a bit clearer. Bit long to engrave on a tombstone though, but SO will remain unburied because after all, most coffins are pretty similar.

I like what Discourse does: it checks for similarity in your subject line (and can extend it to the body) and shows you a list of similar posts next to it. Whereas SO's unspoken motto that it lived and very much died by was always "gotcha": for askers, answerers, and moderators alike. Those meta-moderation traps were real, and it quickly got to where I just didn't bother doing it anymore. Selecting moderators by whether they agreed with the existing moderators was just another ingredient in the poisonous cocktail that SO mixed up itself and gulped down every day.