> your life is still going on but its going on in the forward direction, not backwards in time to overlap an earlier HN state

Wouldn't the proper tense be "I won't have lived long enough to see the entire lifetime of HN" then?

> We like that you are still here with us.

Same here, and it feels like a very "old web" kind of feeling, as we're expressing this empathy towards an anonymous stranger with a very deemphasized username.

I find it surprising how much empathy has seemingly been on a decline as the Web went from anonymity to pseudonymity to everyone's full name and face being attached to their online presence.