I knew 1997 sounded too late. I don’t really miss Usenet, but I do feel nostalgic sometimes.

Yeah, I was thinking that couldn't be right either, because I was struggling with the first MIME encoded emails in the mid-90s and being very annoyed at mailers that would BASE64 the text of the email so they could put in those Microsoft proprietary "smart" quotes.

Care to explain the downvote? The article is from 2011, dammit.

You might have worded it a bit too tersely. I'd go for something like:

Mods: please add [2011] to the title, since the anniversary was in 2011 (MIME was released in 1991).

That makes it clear what should be adjusted, while sounding a bit more polite. That's my guess about the downvote, anyway.

Probably. I keep forgetting there are ordinary social niceties in play on HN :)

Your comment was just fine because minimalism is a value here too. But of course many readers don't know that. Anyhow, we added 2011 above. Thanks!

It’s what makes HN the most civilized community I’ve encountered in a long, long while. These small niceties, though insignificant on their own, make a significant difference in setting the tone for this place.

On a tangential note, the entire subthread starting at [1] was collapsed when I clicked on the comments link for this article. But when I expanded the thread, the text in the post was not greyed out.

Are posts (and their associated subthreads) that were downvoted and subsequently upvoated still collapsed by default?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15933563

Yes, it's a bit strange. I'm the author of the 2011 comment, and it's collapsed for me as well, even though by now it has a definitely positive score of +8. And it was never (to the best of my knowledge) downvoted to below zero.

I assume it's an editorial decision, since the pointed out omission has been rectified, and the thread could thus be deemed noisy and irrelevant.