Satirical Summaries of Hacker News
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The Muskonauts figured out why their shit exploded. Hackernews, literally all of whom are actual rocket scientists, wonders if unit tests could have helped.
Russia addresses their worst nuclear contamination problem by putting a shed on it. Hackernews trades photos of the devastation and bitches about people getting paid money to work on the shed.
An astronaut has passed away. He retired from NASA in 1976, since which time humanity has been phoning it in with this whole space-travel scene. Half of Hackernews recognizes this as the massive failure it is; the other half seizes the opportunity to virtue-signal about all the other problems nobody's fixing.
Ukraine would like a word with you.
This is patently false. Some of us are actual brain surgeons!
"Some people Instagram their food. On Hackernews, foodie cred is earned by bragging about what you don't eat. Sugar. Bread. Dairy. Meat. Caffeine. All of these are linked by science to early stroke, heart attack, cancer, and/or obesity. In addition, to live a long healthy life you need to tend to the bacteria living in your intestine like a Sea Monkey colony -- and don't forget to meditate frequently. I bet you can figure out where all this is headed -- and yes, when a very scientific study was published indicating eating nothing at all gave you regenerative superpowers, the Hackernews dietary virtue-signalers lost their collective mind."
Right on point: Hackernews resumes a previous thread, wherein they admonish each other never to 'roll your own crypto', but rolling your own public-facing internet service, database backend, programming language, kernel, messaging protocol, orbital launcher, autonomous war robot, or legal document is completely fine.
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Google Analytics silently notes which citizens have been contaminated with toxins inimical to surveillance capitalism.
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A user is unironically directed to Reddit for reliable information about illicit pharmaceuticals.
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Upgrade Your SSH Keys ... Nobody has useful input, but a least one user is coherent enough to win Crypto Buzzward Bingo. Nobody upgrades their SSH keys.
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a Hackernews with 'hacker' in his username admits defeat before the inconquerable task of installing three packages.
Eclipse git checkins stopped working immediately after going to a 4K RSA key size. I should have seen it coming.
Does that make me a hipster because I stopped using <4096 RSA keys like 5+ years ago, and quit using RSA on hosts that support better keys?
I'm not sure if it's intentional, but it's raising questions once again in me about how useful the comments in aggregator sites like this end up being. Comments are almost always made by the 10% of people whose barrier to commenting is the lowest and judged and voted on by just the average hackernews reader. Assuming knowledgeable comments even happen, what gets upvoted is what seems reasonable or just pleasing to the average hackernews reader, not what is actually representative of the best available knowledge.
And, as hackernews gets bigger and bigger, the average user becomes more and more like the average internet user in general and the contributions become more and more like if you just talked to a group average person, not experts. If I wanted that kind of knowledge I'd just go talk to people in my daily life, listen to some rumors, etc.
I often suspect that hackernews exists partly because of the idea that conversations and comment sections like this are going to happen anyways and spew ill-formed opinions regardless and ycombinator figured they should at least have a finger in the place where they happen if nothing else.
"The Rust Evangelism Strikeforce" is particularly brilliant.
They're not, say, supercilious lispers who have guarded the bucket of unvarnished truth since 1958 or rubyists promising a path to happiness in this life (and also something about monkeys).
Any truly-large Lisp codebase ends up as an entire Lisp-derivative language. (If not in truth, then in practice: once you've created and employed enough macros in a given project, you've forced anyone who wants to contribute to said project to "learn" the project as if it were its own language anyway.) This effectively isolates the project by the same degree as having been written in an entirely-novel language.
Not any more than the special vocabulary of a project consisting of functions. Or of classes in an object framework.
If I see (foo x y z), and do not know what foo is, I have no idea what happens, regardless of whether foo is a macro or a function. If I know it's a function, then I know that x, y and z are expressions reduced to values; they are not analyzed as syntax. However, that is far from a complete understanding; I still don't know what foo does.
If foo must be a function (I may not use macros), then I have to figure out a way to package everything into the values that x, y and z denote so that foo can do whatever it does. That will likely be harder to understand than a macro.
Anyway, Lisp macros can be expanded. If you think some macro is hard to understand, then invoke macroexpand on the quoted form; see if you like that better. That's what you would have to write if you didn't have the macro.
Just because macros are not allowed doesn't mean that everything is magically understandable and that you don't have to spend weeks, months or even years learning the structure of the code and its vocabulary.
Code without macros still extends the language.
When we define a function, we are extending a language; just like we extend a natural language when we invent a new noun or verb.
I'd like to, for example, write code in an actor language, where the state and message-passing was handled in an Erlang-y way (tagged tuples, message sending as a primitive, every process has an untyped inbox), but then the "body" of each process, between the IO parts, was Haskell or another parametrically-typed ML. You wouldn't even need any concept of an IO monad: all the side-effects would occur "outside" the haskell{} block.
Humour is generally downvoted on HN, because us programmers (mostly) take things too literally. But, seriously, tech really is the biggest laugh because we take each generation of software, language, platforms so seriously, completely ignoring the fact that we are just glorified typists trying to find patterns where none might exist even without having the necessary background to do so.
No, humor is generally downvoted on HN because most of it is lazy, and no one wants HN to turn into another Reddit. Lazy humor is a Reddit staple, and there's already far too much Reddit around as it is. Good humor tends to fare reasonably well, and considerable allowance is made for attempts which fail to be funny but still show effort - otherwise, I doubt I'd get away with doggerel in rhyming couplets [1] and similar such excesses.
I also see some pretty good, very nuanced jokes (the kind you chuckle about at first, then the second level of the joke hits and you chuckle a little harder) getting voted down heavily as well.
Dunno if I can buy the "most of it is lazy" line here.
We're just going to downvote jokes-even if one is made completely within context of discussion? Even if it's an absurdist take on a topic that actually manages to get a laugh-while also / potentially bringing up a valid point?
I'm not asking to argue this with you specifically, I'm just kind of curious in general where that line is drawn with the community.
One thing to keep in mind is that if there's good humor in a comment that has good substantive content as well, it's likely not a bad thing and won't be downvoted. It's comments that are posted for (mostly) humor value alone that I think many in the community are trying to avoid.
Edit to add:
I want to be clear that I'm not anti-humor in general. I do highly value having a place where more serious discussion can be had. And I'm glad HN tends to be that kind of place. There are other places in the world (some of them even on the internet :) where more jovial times can be had.
But alas, I'm fighting windmills here-this is a subject I've discussed in other threads; I understand the want for the community to remain at a certain level. "Jokes"/"Humor" however seem like boogeymen/scapegoats to that end; at least in my opinion.
Edit: Caught your edit here-
One thing to keep in mind is that if there's good human in a comment that has good substantive content as well, it's likely not a bad thing and won't be downvoted.
One would think. I've definitely observed the exact opposite with a frequency that's hard to put aside as 'outlier'. But I get your point.
So far it seems that humour that makes an effort or that is funny doesn't get downvoted and might get upvotes; other humour is ignored or downvoted.
I think jokes get one or two downvotes, just enough to turn them grey, and then people stop downvoting. But maybe I'm wrong about that.
Also, a joke subthread can often have a sort of "gravitational force" that engages people in replying to it such that they never end up contributing to the "real" discussion happening below it, because they never make it there. This effect gets worse the earlier in the comments the joke appears. (This also happens with political tangent-subthreads, but nobody likes those.)
I think (these) people would not be made nearly as upset by jokes if they didn't "interrupt" the flow of conversation by appearing first in comment-subthread-ranking. I'm not sure how that could be done without manual moderation, though; people will always want to reward jokes with points, because jokes do have genuine utility to their consumers. They just can choke out the production of more serious worthwhile sibling contributions.
Lazy.
I just threw my computer out a window reading this. An invoice is on the way to your mailbox :P
oh hang on (what's that Mike?)
Sorry, Built with Rust.
I guess it's finally time for me to learn Rust.
"the Rust Evangelism Strikeforce stages a sortie, but meets resistance."
> 1.1B Taxi Rides on Kdb+/q and 4 Xeon Phi CPUs
An internet posts a resume-building exercise with no practical value or interesting results or useful methodology. Hackernews debates the relative merits of software designed to execute bad programs as quickly as possible. The Rust Evangelism Strikeforce makes a tactical decision not to get involved, since people are talking about fast code.
I wish some day there will be AI-generated summaries like these for news and stories.
It would be so meta if you summarized this post.
The page has both RSS and Atom feeds. View source is your friend.
Every time some article has a headline in the format "$company wants to $verb_phrase", Paul Graham huffs a kitten.
Now, poking fun at HN culture and feeling of self-importance however that is funny IMO.
Satire is funnier when it's accurate. "bad implementations of modern Linux tools" is incorrect here because the tools are the same binaries that come with Ubuntu.
You need some training articles, and then it generates such sentences.
Don't forget that @horse_ebooks was a human as well.
Now read the first letters of each word.
Now go do something useful.
edit: spellin
I especiky like how they meticulously avoid the majority of social issues to really drill down on the arbitrary tech decisions. That's how you know it's true satire and time we'll spent.