Hacker News Reader

Comment by nxzero | Hacker News Reader

“What’s the WiFi password?”

Interesting; tomorrow I'm going to ask five people this exact question just to see what happens.

EDIT: Obviously if you've read the article, it states this is like asking "do you know what time it is?" - that is it's an known excuse to start a conversation. Personally, I don't believe this, hence my experiment.

View on HN

penny-get-your-own-wifi

Penny: Hey, Sheldon, did you change your wifi password again?

Sheldon: Yes, it's "Penny, get your own wifi." No spaces.

___

TV-Show: The Big Bang Theory

Source: http://www.tvfanatic.com/quotes/hey-sheldon-did-you-change-y...

Are you a bot?

Looking through their other posts, I don't think so.

A bot that recognizes approximately-quoted pop culture references and provides their source would be a hell of a bot.

Oh boy... it's actually not that hard to imagine a future of spambot's running on neural networks. :/

Hmm... A new idea for me, which probably will make someone here on HN rich:

Helpful bots that monitors your communication and suggests cultural jokes, to impress people?

Oh man, helper apps like that are going to make kids online even more difficult to detect and avoid.

And the same networks could fuel spam filters, eventually leading to: https://xkcd.com/810/.

God damn it, I just love XKCD.

Can someone please explain (or point out a link to the rules in question) why is this post getting downvoted? I understand the parent comment is not very informative, but this one I found quite helpful as I had forgotten the quote in question and it is relevant to the "wi-fi password discussion" the grandparent has started.

Additionally I would simply love a bot like that going around explaining popular media quotes. I frequent the SpaceX subreddit and they have one explaining space related acronyms whenever any are found in the discussion. Makes reading it a lot more pleasant.

I think there's a HN cultural preference to avoid stream-of-consciousness tangents, so even clever or informative -- but off-topic -- replies to such tangents tend to suffer.

IMO this is the source of some people's impression that humour isn't welcome here. My experience is the opposite - on-topic (and funny) comments do well even if only a joke or quip, but off-topic humour sinks, even if clever and civil.

I'm quite lowbrow and really enjoy the more clever comment chains on Reddit, but I also appreciate the HN alternative, where attempts at pun chains, etc. sink to the bottom and on-topic thoughts rise.

If you really wanted to find out about the quote, it's just a google search away. For everyone else, it's useless pop culture trivia obscuring real content.

(The right way to do this would be to add a feature to the HN/reddit forum software that allows unobtrusive footnotes to comments. Acronyms could just be auto-hyperlinked (with short definition in the alt text) in the original comment.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com