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Comment by SomeHacker44 | Hacker News Reader

"This was obviously an unforeseen bug that was nearly impossible to anticipate..."

Snarky... Except that there were probably years of games to notice that you were approaching a "magic number" like 2^31.

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I actually read that quote as fully sarcastic.

As expected, sarcasm always translates correctly into textual form.

It's weird that you say that, because I always felt sarcasm didn't translate well to text.

I think it was sarcasm

Sarcasm is recursive.

Yours is the first comment in this chain that I can say pretty confidently isn't sarcasm. So it kind of breaks the chain, making the sarcasm in this chain non-recursive. Which means maybe you were being sarcastic after all? Actually I don't even know if my own comment is sarcasm or not.

Your comment comes across as sincere. Mine was sincere, but an overstatement. I should have said that sarcasm tends to be recursive, until broken by sincerity. Anyway, here's my take on the chain:

SomeHacker44 -- sincere

CGamesPlay -- sincere

blktiger -- sarcastic

i_cant_speel -- mildly sarcastic

jazoom -- sincere

Yes because what we have always known about sarcasm and what this thread is a perfect example of is how you can define something as sarcastic/not sarcastic just by how it subjectively "comes across".

Yes, you can guess. But assessment depends strongly on context. And Pow's Law still applies. People can write messages that seem sincere, and then later claim sarcasm. As in "I was only joking". Or people can write sincerely, but come across as sarcastic, or vice versa, and yet be ambiguous enough that readers can't tell. That's where the /s flag help. Done intentionally, such ambiguous messages can probe the reader's state of mind. Or set traps.

But maybe you're just being sarcastic ;)

It's the base case

Poe's law.

That's not snark. That's just self-doubt, expressed. "We never thought we'd host 2^31 chess games."

EDIT: Apparently they already said that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14540509

On the contrary, this is pretty much the perfect example of the completely anticipatible bug.

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