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Comment by ridiculous_fish | Hacker News Reader

Some fun comp.lang.c history:

Dennis Ritchie posted, sharing an extremely early version of a C compiler. Richard Heathfield (well known C book author) jokingly chided Ritchie for posting something off-topic, as it was not part of ANSI C. In typical Usenet fashion, this triggered a huge thread, arguing over the appropriateness of the joke. Even Linus Torvalds got involved.

Apparently Heathfield emailed Ritchie privately to apologize, and Ritchie's response is well known to anyone in clc: "Usenet is a strange place."

Original thread: https://groups.google.com/g/alt.folklore.computers/c/wbzzoyS... (I believe it was crossposted to clc)

Some discussion of the saga: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Dennis_Ritchie

RIP dmr

View on HN

This is hilarious. I could see something similar happening on HN today.

It shouldn't matter whether or not it's hilarious. Attempts at humor often fall flat on the internet and are somewhat frowned on per HN guidelines. You're objectively wrong and anyone who agrees should chime in to say so. Disagree? Fine, but come to this thread to tell us why. #s

Humor is an integral part of the human experience and connecting with someone else. Saying “ban humor” leaves the community very sterile.

You missed the "#s" at the end of the parent post

What does it mean? (Free bashing a newb opportunity ;)

This is precisely the problem: differing views not just on what is actually humorous, but the role that is should play in conversations, written or otherwise. Better to just avoid it all together #s ::I think we're off to a good start replicating the usenet scenario::

> Saying “ban humor” leaves the community very sterile.

...or makes it even more hilarious.

Because you really can't "ban" humor. A moderator who actually thinks that's possible will soon have humor flying over their head. Even Stackoverflow has humor despite the best efforts of the self-appointed vote-to-close police.

Poe's law

Re humor on HN: not a problem in the guidelines or in practice. HN just has higher standards for humor, and that's a good thing.

Nerd discussions are always the same, no matter the medium...

Dang et al would never let it happen.

Personal attacks are not cool on HN. We ban accounts that post like that. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do it again.

Wait what? I was singing HN’s moderators namely Dang. There’s no personal attack here.

If it’s not clear I was saying bannable speech and such would not be tolerated here because of the good moderation.

I think this may have been an attempt at humor by ruined where the post they made employs similar phrasing that dang uses when he's informing a user about a violation of the HN guidelines.

I think you might be right.

Well crap, it went over my head.

That joke is truly, laugh-out-loud funny.

Actually the annoying thing here is, that the pointless discussion is achieved, while the link to the source code doesn't work (maybe temporarily overloaded from HN? Maybe dead)

It is on the Wayback Machine at least:

http://web.archive.org/web/20070223091507/http://www.cs.bell...

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