[Arnt]

Well, I'm sorry if the quotations are misleading. I find it difficult to insert long quotations on HN, while making them look like quotations. So I tried to pick good, representative but short ones.

Could you show me how you would do it? Post something and insert long enough quotations (from the part I partly quoted) that they are fair and representative, and still clearly look like quotations?

[WaltGisnep]

Asking me to show you seems like a troll question

[Arnt]

I know. It's an honest question though. Look at my blog and see how trollish I am, if you want.

I wonder whether the difficulty of quoting extensively contributes to the sometimes too polarised tone on HN. As far as I can tell it's ~impossible to do civilised things like quoting two paragraphs, emphasising the key parts and appending "emphasis mine". Try it, and IME people will be unable to tell the quoted parts from your own. It's a magnet for misunderstandig due to lack of markup.

The best I've been able to do is to keep quotations down to a line or a little more than that, so that both quotation marks are clearly visible at the same time. But that shortness opens the quotation to people saying "taken out of context", no matter how much I try to pick fairly.

"The best that I've been able to do" ≠ "the best that can be done".