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Do you mind if I ask you an OT question? How do you spend time on HN making these long, seemingly well researched comments and still get time to do all the othe
by nindalf 11y ago
Do you mind if I ask you an OT question? How do you spend time on HN making these long, seemingly well researched comments and still get time to do all the other productive things you do?
- tptacek 11y agoWhen I was 15 years old I hitchhiked with an old blind BBS sysop I met in jail to a BellSouth central office in rural Mississipi, where the devil appeared before me and allowed me to bet my soul that I couldn't best him in an alt.atheism flamewar. I wrote a comment that worked Kibo, Hitler, the game of Diplomacy, and 15 logical fallacies, 3 of which I invented on the spot, and a vanquished prince of the underworld gave me the gift of "Most Powerful Message Board Nerd on the Planet". The blind sysop went on to become Steve Vai. You can still find Satan if you know the right subreddit to look in.
- tptacek 11y agoI think the shorter answer might just be "was a teenager on Usenet".
- tzs 11y agoAhh...usenet. I was on usenet a long time...early 1984 [1] until a couple or so years ago. Every time I have to deal with some crappy forum software on the web, I remember how much nicer newsreaders were, and wish people would do web based forums by using an NNTP server and providing a browser-based NNTP client for it, and would allow people to use their own clients if they wished. [1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/net.unix-wizards/CYhCInFq2bA https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/net.unix-wizards/CYh...