So the trick is:

- Change your email address to something like kjghoyvgljhbvljhvkljhbv@mailinator.com.

- If you get a confirmation message to your old address, delete it.

- Change your password to jkhvouyflkjbv7897t^%REjhvljyyf.

- Go to the mailinator address to confirm the change.

- Clear your browser history.

Then you're free of HN forever! ... Or until you make a new account.

It's kind of crazy that there's no "forgot password" option. I can understand not allowing account deletion, because you don't want to break conversations by having someone's comments mass-deleted, but not having a password retrieval mechanism is just foolish. Amateur hour incarnate. This does not look like a system designed by someone who's making a real commitment.

What a shame there's no "delete account" option. Should I do something unutterably awful to get pg's attention (accuse him of murdering kittens or raping puppies or writing software in Visual C++?) or shall I just do as the OP did and change my password to something unmemorable? If I change my email to a random mailinator account, that will make password recovery impossible too, I suspect.

This is why I long to own a t-shirt bearing the words "Practising Peddant".

To this day, I still can't remember which is correct - "than", "from" or "to". But I can remember the look on his face, and the fact that after that he stuck with slightly less aggravating teaching methods.

(Edit: "different to" sounded wrong. I could never remember which way that goes.)

My theory was that the govt wasn't letting him back in the country because someone saw the Hitch Hiker's Guide movie and decided to enforce a minimum standard...

Theoretical result: raised dots punched into the paper by the daisy wheel, able to be read by a blind person.

Actual result: the proportions were wrong for reading, and most of the time the paper jammed on the roller because of the padding.

Nice idea though.

FTTH is still available if you want to pay thousands of dollars for your connection, of course. We call this FTTR: Fibre To The Rich.

Also: vale. A talented artist with a distinctive voice.

I gather D7 has improved on this a bit, though it's still nowhere near Wordpress in this regard.

The main trouble I had with the culture was that complexity was seen as something necessary for power; as in, you can't achieve a result with a simple system. You can only chop down a tree with a Swiss Army Knife; an axe is too simple. This carried over into the disastrous decision to throw out all the code, including third-party extensions, in every major version update, meaning that stuff you wrote and tricks you learned for version N would be almost completely useless for version N+1. I found that idea so totally beyond hopeless that I was forced to throw out what I had spent years laboriously learning and move over to Wordpress, which suffers from none of these problems.