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wccrawford
It's also getting quite common so see just:

/flame

I can only imagine that's coming from the html-style metadata they are showing in these exactly, but made a lot easier to type for non-hackers. I rather like it myself, even.

vog
To me, that plain "/flame" at the beginning of a line looks more like a pseudo-IRC. Note that IRC is still common among lots of hackers. Other IRC-related statements might be:

/me is angry|happy|whatever

/join ...

any maybe others. Those aren't used very often, though.

wccrawford
Actually, I see it at the end. Example:

I totally love what you did there.

/sarcasm

At the beginning, I'd definitely agree with you.

pluies_public
But then, you can't tell whether the sarcasm was intended from the very beginning of the message or merely the last sentence/paragraph.
epochwolf
I prefer this method in irc </sarcasm>
adambyrtek
This might be related to the fact that some broken web applications blindly remove angle brackets instead of properly escaping them.
danohuiginn
still surprisingly accurate, despite being a decade or so out-of-date.
pnathan
I have found that hacker/programmer writing style tends to be grammatically correct and with complete sentences, as a rule of thumb.
obiterdictum
As far as I remember, the distinction between "typesetter" quotation and "logical" quotation appears in computerized typesetting. In traditional paper typesetting, a quote was kerned together with a period (or a comma) into a single character, so that quote is above, not before or after the period.
imd
I don't know about that. Neither old books I've seen nor TeX do that.
obiterdictum
Disclaimer: I don't have a citation for this, I just remember it mentioned a few times, so I may very well be wrong.
JohnnyBrown
> It may well be that future historians of literature will see in it a revival of the great tradition of personal letters as art.

Ah what might have been ...

th0ma5
I recently watched David Foster Wallace on Charlie Rose, and given his history in semantic research, and I would equate his style with these ideas. I don't know if this concept of a hacker writing style is a new phenomenon, but more a bi-product of mathematical aspects of language understanding.