[tangled_zans]

Oh! Sorry, I didn't mean to misunderstand. The reason I found it funny was because it reminded me of something a close friend would say, because that's exactly the sort of thing that I'm into.

I'm totally with you on the whole "wasted a lot of time in my youth pursuing unsuccessful paths" thing. And looking back, yeah, it's the stuff that the adults/authority figures in your youth don't tell you that really throws you off. So many times in the ten years that I've left school I've had those "aha" moments, and then I thought "well, that would've been pretty useful to know a decade ago". And the annoying thing is, is realizing that there were people my age who already knew that thing back then, due to a slightly different upbringing. It would be nice to minimize that sort of unpredictable randomness from the process.

Do you want to chat more about this off-site? I think we could come up with some interesting ideas between the two of us!

[nkurz]

  >> This was literally the funniest thing that
  >> I've read on HN so far.
  >
  > This was not meant to be funny.

As an outsider reading the comments as they arrived, it felt like a slow motion train wreck. Initially I read wolfgke's proposal as straight forward, although after tangled_zan's response I was less sure. It seemed like a delicious irony in the context of a thread about overcoming the difficulty of reading other's intents.

In the spirit of Teen Talk Barbie (http://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/21/business/company-news-matt...) allow me to say "Communication is hard!". Your polite recovery on both sides, though, is something all should aspire to.

[tangled_zans]

Thanks for the compliment!

Yeah, I did not intend for my "this was funny" comment in a negative light, it was a genuinely fun thing to read.

I often wish that more people came up to me with proposal of developing domain specific formal systems, so when it actually happened in reality, I was a bit taken offguard by the unexpectedness of it :P