I lost it at the quoted text, haven’t laughed this much in days. Classic HN sentence fragment of middlebrow dismissal with just enough obliviousness to social norms that it might be satire, but with such deadpan delivery you just don’t know. Pure gold.
I'm an American, and he's mostly right, and I'm not offended, because it wasn't nasty and wasn't about me--it was just a harmless, general observation.
What is this world coming to if we can't even discuss regional styles of humor?
Dan, may I suggest that you are taking this job too seriously. You are going to look back in the future and wonder why you spent so much time controlling others' speech on a Web site. You're so concerned about HN's value as a vessel, but so unconcerned with the value of what's inside it. You're a talented Lisper who seems to waste most of his time moderating, playing whack-a-troll and arguing with people about arguing (like me, here). You have more potential than you are fulfilling here, and you could be doing much more important things.
If someone had said it to me in real life, I would have laughed.
On the internet? Well, those are the people who eat Tide Pods...
Ironically, phrasing was a pure product of pre-coffee morning + living in a part of the US where anti-vax comments are a daily occurrence, but it delights me I was responsible for a few smiles. (Including my own, re-reading it)
And truth be told, "hot" emerged from morning fugue, after rejecting infected, live, and potentially hazardous as less accurate.
"Is there then a way to spot a fake positive test? The antibodies (like most proteins) are capable of refolding and regaining their function when they are returned to more favourable conditions. So I tried washing a test that had been dripped with cola with buffer solution, and sure enough the immobilised antibodies at the T-line regained normal function and released the gold particles, revealing the true negative result on the test."
Public officials can easily do this in order to bust the kids.