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Comment by marchenko | Hacker News Reader

I bet it is a reference to the ABBA song "Gimme Gimme Gimme (a man after midnight)"

Edit: I see that is the explanation given on StackOverflow. This is probably the fewest bits needed to encode a widely-distributed earworm.

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> This is probably the fewest bits needed to encode a widely-distributed earworm.

someBODY

I recently wrote a tool that worked on bodies of text in Rust. Had multiple instances of

    if let Some(body) = ...

You know that you could use Some(body)

I'm working on a game engine in Rust in my spare time, I'll probably end up with that same code in the physics side.

...once told me...

Damn it, I can hear it in my head!

oh god, it won't stop playing in my head. I know there's a pause button somewhere. reaches for hammer see you in a few hours. thwack

Can someone explain this, please?

It is a reference to a song by Smash Mouth:

https://youtu.be/L_jWHffIx5E

(And now it'll be stuck my head for a week)

At the risk of being a serious weirdo and way overexplaining: gladly!

An earworm[1] is a (part of a) song that gets stuck in your head.

The GP was wondering if "gimmie gimmie gimmie"[2] was the fewest bytes required to put one in someone's head.

I shaved 12 bytes off by using All-Star[3] by Smash Mouth. It was a very popular song in its day, it's newer than ABBA, and lately it's become a meme[4] of its own[5], partly on the back of being featured in Shrek. It's even the basis for a trilogy[6] of mash-up[7] albums[8].

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earworm

[2]: https://youtu.be/3wCK6INQcHs

[3]: https://youtu.be/L_jWHffIx5E

[4]: https://youtu.be/0Iqr0L4bUms

[5]: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=all+star+but

[6]: http://www.neilcic.com/mouthsounds/

[7]: http://www.neilcic.com/mouthsilence/

[8]: http://www.neilcic.com/mouthmoods/

Hash collision.

    Somebody (somebody) ooh somebody (somebody) 
    Can anybody find me .... somebody to love?

https://youtu.be/kijpcUv-b8M

That's why I used casing to differentiate

Even sticking to ABBA, "Waterloo!" is fewer bits and triggers an earworm just as well, but of course waterloo is not a man after midnight.

Part of the challenge is finding some plausible reason to have the string come up in the context of operating a Unix system.

Maybe Rihanna will come out with a song called "Grep". Heck, maybe the Black-Eyed Peas already did...

One could speculate further and propose that it refers to Narada Michael Walden's "Gimme Gimme Gimme" from 1985: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUzQv71iVeU.

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