Heyyyyyyyyyyyy.com | Hacker News Reader

Heyyyyyyyyyyyy.com

heyyyyyyyyyyyy.com

843 pointsthesephist192 comments

Hey all :) creator here (and yes, you can reach me at linus@heyyyyyyyyyyyy.com).

Was talking with a friend last night and I bought this domain on a whim because I thought it would be funny. And then spent a couple hours making this landing page and it's since turned into this elaborate joke. Hope it added something to your day~ haha

If I may make a suggestion, redirect the Rickroll link through a "/reserve" link on your site so it's not immediately obvious on mouse hover.

That's against the spirit of rickroll, you're supposed to fool the person into clicking it without elaborate tricks, just a link.

Darn, you spoiled it for me! I clicked anyways just to check :)

I clicked all three buttons and enjoyed the song 3 times. I dont care

I saw on hover where it would lead to, but I clicked anyway because the site deserved it. I listened to the whole song.

How can you not listen to the whole song, that's the point, it's awesome xD

The song is awesome, but the clip is cringy as can be.

From the awkward dancing, nonsensical acrobating and sunglassing to Rick himself. Even though the song's got a good beat, he can't seem to move to it no matter how hard the editor tries to cut or how cool he tries to look. And I'm always surprised by such a deep voice coming from such a skimpy guy, which contributes to the joke.

I prefer this version of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQoA_wjmE9w

You may have missed an opportunity there.

The interweb is truly a bottomless pit

well no need to click the link now

I actually love this type of design. Did you have any inspirations? Any frameworks used?

Hey, thanks! I used a CSS library [0] I wrote myself last year that I use for a bunch of other projects of mine, most famously lyrics.rip [1] and free.linus.zone (my free-busy calendar I wrote myself) [2]. It gives the site the "faux-3D" aesthetic.

[0] https://thesephist.github.io/blocks.css/

[1] https://www.lyrics.rip

[2] https://thesephist.com/posts/frieden/

That's a really cool framework. Good job and thanks for sharing.

I love the design! I might end up using it on some of my own projects!

How do you remember how many Y's to use? Or did you just register all the in-between ones as well :p

It’s easy to remember: $100 per Y, equals $1200 a year.

With a price like that you never forget how many Y’s you are buying!

I tried to sign up like a gullible fool! :-)

I like it, but my very scientific algorithms I have developed with the use of science suggest it needs 479% more Arthur Fonzarelli on the home page to achieve legendary status.

Aw, you missed a great opportunity! I would've loved a "Hey Hey Heyyyyyyyyyyyy.com" [1]

[1]https://youtu.be/Zw6T4Db7_7o?t=29

I really appreciate the time put into this. Thanks for sharing.

I was hoping the YouTube link was to the He-Man Heya video instead:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ5LpwO-An4&t=10s

Yes I love this video!

The full version is much better! I didn't realize there was a whole thing until a while after I saw the link you gave.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32FB-gYr49Y

Honestly I've listened to it for years, I had no idea there was a longer version... That's awesome, thanks for sharing.

Bitconeeeeeeeeeeeee

HEY HEY HEY! ITS FAT ALBERT!!!

Oh, so it was your name. I was starting to wonder if my browser leaks my logged in username somehow.

Somehow I think the joke would be more fun if you dropped the unrealistic perks and actually sold it for $1200 a year.

Absolutely. This could be another Million Dollar Homepage idea.

I actually didn't realize it was a joke until reading the HN thread lol. I like it!

> Interested? Reach out to hey@heyyyyyyyyyyyy.com to start our hand-crafted, three-month-long, white-glove onboarding process which comes with a complementary bottle of champagne, a traditional mud massage, a door handle from a vintage Rolls-Royce Phantom, a portrait of a dead European royalty framed in gold, Leonardo Da Vinci's left thumb, and of course, your very own heyyyyyyyyyyyy.com email.

I feel like if you read that part, it is pretty obvious that this thing isn't real.

A man can dream...

Right? There's only so many Phantoms out there.

Oh I definitely realized it was over the top but didn't realize it was a joke.

Then it wouldn't be a joke, it would be "art".

I love this. I finally managed to trick my ultra suspicious friend. We have an informal contest where we send eachother to *that destination.

I was entertained until I clicked a link and awoke my baby in the next room with sudden audio. Trying to get back into the YouTube app to stop Premium background audio playback was .. hectic.

Site seemed slightly entertaining, baby is awake, I'm not currently amused ;)

You must have been really bored ;)

Was expecting a redirect to Hoooooooooooo.com....but the site I was thinking of is https://heeeeeeeey.com/

thank you! I LOL'd when I saw it :)

Hi, I can't register. Each time I click, a weird old video opens. Can someone help me ? I tried to contact the creator of the site to tell him that he messed up with his register link.

Yes this is a serious bug. Looks like a javascript event bubbling problem to do with the button - anyone got any insights?

After a thorough dive into the source code, it seems to be an issue with click events with the attribute 'rick', rolling off the JS call-stack incorrectly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rickrolling

I'm getting this link as well. Does the site accept Bitcoin?

It would be stellar if they accepted attention tokens, too.

Clicked on that. Mildly disappointed that it didn't redirect to the video.

Unlike other email startups, this one promises to never give you up or let you down. I expect them to resist every attempt at acquisition.

(I miss you, Mailbox, Sparrow...)

Zenbe :(

The promises explicitly included 'no customer support'. I'd say Linus is already close to the line here with his answers in this thread.

PoissonVache is not a customer yet.

I think their transpiler from typescript to ecmascript 7 has a bug when using web components with Angular

This is very promise project. I also really want an email with this domain. So sad about this critical bug.

Same here. Some dancing man keeps telling me he's never going to give me up.

It's a RAITM attack (Rick-Astley-In-The-Middle) I think.

Enjoyable to see these mockery sites. The original Hey marketing was just asking to get mocked. Hopefully they take it in good spirit. The lesson learned I think is, don’t act like God unless you want to get mocked for it.

I like this parody, but I don’t understand what you are saying about Hey’s original marketing. What’s particularly arrogant about product designers saying they’ve identified and solved a problem?

Here’s what they originally put up, for reference: http://web.archive.org/web/20200207101953/https://www.hey.co...

To be honest, I think that landing page is great.

HN people will get mad when a landing page is not just words on a page, but will also get mad when it is.

My biggest gripe about Hey is that it’s marketed as an email client, but it’s actually a proprietary database you get access to through something that looks like an email address.

I’m exaggerating a bit. But I don’t understand why they built a service and not a client.

For me, email is about being not locked into a specific client. And Hey requires a separate client than the one for my existing email addresses.

I see Hey marketing as "Email" more than a client or an app. Yes, it's a weird positioning, but to be fair it's also a weird service.

They're not about better managing your existing inbox, and I also think completely changing the management of a third party email services while staying within the standards is a lost battle. Hey doesn't solve my issues with email either, but I am sympathic to people trying to rebuild an experience beyond what existing clients can do.

> But I don’t understand why they built a service and not a client.

Some of the core features aren't feasible with a simple client. For example screening new contacts by default, merging/renaming threads only for you, adding notes to a thread, save bits of content…

> screening new contacts by default

A client could certainly handle this, but it may not translate to other instances of the client.

> merging/renaming threads only for you

An advertised feature that did not even work on their release. Maybe they fixed it by now, I don't know, I did not end up buying the product. The initial release was quite buggy.

Anecdotally, I’ve renamed and merged several threads between the initial release and now.

I know that feature was on their internal list of bug fixes, so it sounds like they got through at least that far on the list!

Yes, I don’t think they’re proceeding in order of report. I‘ve had any significant reported bugs fixed within hours. A couple minor ones are persistent. I assume whatever issue you saw with thread management was fixed quickly as it’s a core feature in the marketing, and demonstrated live by Jason in his product demo streams.

For all its promises of open-source friendliness, Tutanota is basically the same. They don't support accessing email through SMTP.

On Tutanota your email are encrypted at rest and only you have the key. This is not supported by SMTP.

It's a trade-off for theoretically better privacy.

It's not marketed as an email client - they're marketing for a certain experience.

> For me, email is about being not locked into a specific client. And Hey requires a separate client than the one for my existing email addresses.

The graveyard of services acquired or dead (or both) is littered with those who attempted to 1) bring about radical change to email 2) without disrupting the current ecosystem of mail clients and hosts. It clearly almost never worked for anyone, so I at least applaud them for going out of their way, loudly trying to veer off of said graveyard. It speaks to the experience they're selling. It may not have appealed to you, but they aren't short of the ones it appealed to.

Now, whether it'll work out for them, that's another topic :D

Part of the issue was how they handled the "application" to be one of the first users. It was quite pretentious. They wanted you to express yourself in some novel, poetic way to convince them you are worthy of testing their golden new service. It was silly. In the end, it was also meaningless, everyone got invites anyway. But, the arrogance lingers.

Yes, I linked to that page. “ To get on the list, email iwant@hey.com and tell us how you feel about email. Could be a love story, or a hate story — or both. Could be long, could be short. It’s your story, so it’s up to you.”

I wouldn’t call that novel or poetic but I understand resenting it.

Regardless, it’s quite pretentious to expect people to put forth creative and expressive energy for something they’re possibly going to end up paying you money for anyway.

It’s an interesting question. I’m willing to spend time and energy on top of money for a lot of things. For software, it feels more extra than, say, going to the grocery store, but I don’t know if that actually makes it wrong for a software company to require the effort. And that’s complicated by the value some derive from small exercises like that.

I don't think email is broken for everybody. Maybe so for Jason Fried and other popular techies who get so much email because they are public figures. Not for my family and friends.

So when I read their pitch, I see another locked in platform à la Slack. The tone is quite pretentious too. Sounds more like a pitch from a clique leader to join them.

That's what bothers me I guess.

It was broken for me. I've moved to Hey and couldn't be happier with it.

> The tone is quite pretentious too. Sounds more like a pitch from a clique leader to join them.

This is Basecamp you're talking about. That's part of the cultural DNA.

On the contrary, it will make Hey more known to the community, like free advertising. Mockery is probably the best tool for growth hacking ;)

I thought this would be https://heeeeeeeey.com/

Heads up, adds items to your browser history, might make it difficult to go back.

If you wait until the end of the redirects, it goes back to where you were originally.

I hoped it would be HeyYeYaaeYaaaeYaeYaa.com which once used to show this important piece of Meme History: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ5LpwO-An4

Sadly it’s now a parked domain :(

I've actually been trying to remember the URL to this website on and off for the last six years (note to self, 8 'e's), so thanks for scratching that itch.

Rickrolling is no longer fun with a pre-roll ad

Install an adblocker so you can still be rickrolled like old times.

This is the sole reason for me to keep uBlock installed.

First you need to type in your password you can go hunter2 my hunter2-ing hunter2.

I didn't know people without adblockers existed.

You'd think youtube would be onto this, as a service to the community...

Check out https://cock.li for domains such as @national.shitposting.agency

The one below your suggestion is concerning..

rape.lol is totally fine though.

Yeah this is the edgy far-right hiding behind "free speach"

The channel "Counter Arguments" made a great video about why I would consider this kind of joke A-ok.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm739aB98-M

looks like I'll be that guy. This service is by and for users of the /g/ 4chan board. Edginess is something of a feature for the projects that spawn there.

> # How can I trust you?

> You can't.

If only every service was so straightforward.

I thought you could at least have trusted him to never give you up. What a let down!

I use this service but I think there's something wrong with their servers because I don't seem to get any emails? Oddly enough emails from my gmail account works but literally 0 of the 100+ job recruiters I've emailed has responded so I think there's something wrong.

- I.R. Agne (i.r.ange@420blaze.it)

It's a knife fight out there with the current economy.

Keep trying.

From what I've seen this service seems to have a lot of outages.

Needed a free SMTP service and did not want to use google, but this did not cut it.

I tried using one of their domains to send patches to LKML and got rate limited after two patches in a four patch series. Seriously a PITA.

Wow, that's actually the least stupid domain in the list...

Another great parody here: https://bye.fyi

Too bad it is broken:

> Your message wasn't delivered to demo@bye.fyi due to an error. > > The response was: > > write EPROTO 140451178456960:error:14094438:SSL routines:ssl3_read_bytes:tlsv1 alert internal > error:../deps/openssl/openssl/ssl/record/rec_layer_s3.c:1544:SSL alert number 80 > > > If you need help, forward this to support@forwardemail.net or visit https://forwardemail.net.

it's not supposed to be a real product either

I'm actually sad I can't really get a heyyyyyyyyyyyy email.

just register your own domain with varying amount of Ys. At this point there is no meaningful difference between 12 Ys and 13 Ys.

Are you kidding? Nobody will take you seriously if you try to pass the 13 y hey off as the 12 y hey. How can anyone trust you when they can't even trust the domain of your email?

I am now the proud owner pv@heyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy.com. Looks like I was a bit slow 17ys!

Haha I wonder if basecamp people would get mad and start throwing out cease and desist letters once a bunch of people start using variation of heyyyyyy...yy.com domains for their email addresses.

Can you still get a goatse e-mail address though?

Interesting. The source code for the Useless Web[0] lists `heeeeeeeey.com`

    var sitesList = [
    "http://heeeeeeeey.com/",
    "http://corndog.io/",

But not https://heyyyyyyyyyyyy.com/

Source:

https://d33wubrfki0l68.cloudfront.net/js/ac60b9af5090596957c...

[0] https://theuselessweb.com/

So psyched! Had to leave my billing details in the comments of the reserve page. Fingers crossed.

Heyy anyone got an invite code to share please?

Sure, please explain your life to me and amuse me in some way, and I’ll send you an invite.

    [Reserve Now]
    (31/200 left in stock)

Considering the activity of HN users, I found these numbers highly suspicious. (But a good try anyway.) I wonder what is the best number for tempting a click. Maybe you should increase these as the site popularity grows?

Now that the post has more than 500+ upvotes, better give a number beyond 1000 for a conservative and believable value. I almost felt it was not true before clicking it, but clicked any wa. :)

> I found these numbers highly suspicious

You can try reserving one and seeing if the number decreases.

If this doesn't disrupt current markets, idk what will.

I found a bug: If I resize the window to cover both my screens the title bar, I run out of Ys. Unacceptable!

https://i.imgur.com/Jw0NTxf.png

weird flex but ok

This is fucking comedy gold, absolutely brilliant.

Signed up for my heyyyyyyyyyyyy.com email account and I'm thrilled to find out that I'm user #15!!! My life is officially complete.

One perk of being friends with Linus is that he gives you email addresses...

Send memes to mg@heyyyyyyyyyyyy.com (this actually works)!

I thought that was going to be: https://heeeeeeeey.com/, and wondered what it's doing at HN's top...

[Content Warning: contains audio, loops, might be annoying, rip your browser history]

Does anyone remember the exact domain for that joke website that had the picture of the wire spring doorstopper that would just play the BOINGGGGG sound when you clicked on it?

It was something like boinnnnnngggggg.com but I can’t remember it or find it in my old bookmarks.

That's the downside with a name like that. It's not very memorable.

Clearly they should have removed the vowels to make it easy to remember and named it bnnnnnngggggg.com :)

Sarcasm aside, if you do end up finding it, post here: that sounds like a hilarious one.

Ok you got me xD A great example of this silly thing called social engineering.

@"I have L5 disposable income".com

Similar to omg.lol

I actually have an email with them. I use it when I have to give an email, specially in person. It's so much fun when people see this sort of email address!

Hmm, is that better or worse than Heyyyyyyyyyyy.com?

While we're here, can anyone who's been using Hey for a little while share how it's been? I did the trial and liked it, but it felt a little bit micromanagey and I just didn't know if it'd get better after changing all my accounts and using the screener for a month or more.

A month or so in and it's still a lot of micromanaging. My biggest sticking point is that I'm unsure of which email address may be used for important notifications and the like so I'm hesitant to screen things out a lot of the time unless they are basically spam.

Oh yeah, that was a problem I had. My health insurance uses the same email to send marketing spam as they do to send test results, so I couldn't screen them out. Maybe they'll add some IF fields on the subject line in the future.

Jokes on you, I really wanted an email.

Thumb up from me for the potential archaeoclonal side play.

https://www.google.com/search?q=da+vinci+duke+of+milan+lette...

I, for one, miss uselessaccount.com and feel that this product fills an important niche.

I expected it would link to this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32FB-gYr49Y instead of a rick roll! Nice one.

There used to be a website for that, but it looks like the domain registration expired :(

This is pretty great. I think DHH will get a kick out of it.

My favorite parody site made fun of web frameworks and called them "crystal node grunt gems for ninjas". The whole website was genius, but I can't seem to find it anymore. :(

Does anybody else have any more parody sites? (Or know the one I'm referring to?)

http://vanilla-js.com/ Probably not the one you are referring to; but made in same spirit.

http://www.coboloncogs.org/

(cf. early versions of the Rails site: https://web.archive.org/web/20060101025821/http://rubyonrail...)

https://downloadmoreram.com/

We likely won't know for a while what DHH thinks of it. He's on hiatus until November https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1292784841444986880

Bravo ! Making the world a better place one y at a time !

With so many parodies popping up regularly I consider this an accidental(?) growth vector for the original product. Let's see what comes next.

Change the href of the "Reserve now" button to "/signup", and then redirect to the page it's sending users to.

I was completely ready to sign up for an account.

got the actual sign up page at the 2048th click

Ads on YouTube broke Rick rolling.

> Interested? Reach out to hey@heyyyyyyyyyyyy.com

Missed an opportunity to double the silliness here

Suggestion: Rick roll plays in the background 3 seconds after opening the page.

I'm surprised that Gmail team hasn't created a HEY theme yet.

I see you, XcQ…

Clever site, tho. Gonna see how many do-workers will click.

Just want to say thanks. This made my morning. :D

I have been rickrolled...thrice. Good job.

Yeah well I fell for it. Well done. :)

:'( Got Rick Rolled :'(

Race to the end of the page.....

Meh I'll wait for the TLD

I laughed out loud, well done

this made me crack up. impressive amount of work for a joke. love it

Quite funny, but I think it needs to take a bigger dig on hey.com's pricing and offering.

> $100 for each "y"

Ah, flipping hey.com's model of charging more for shorter addresses. Genius!

> So expensive, you'll never forget to cancel

This should be right at the top! And it applies to hey.com too (for many people)! :)

Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii.com

It is what it is

Most startups on HN would be far more honest if they just came full circle and made an email app like hey.com.

But anyway, looking forward to the Microsoft Word, errr, Notion clones in the coming months.

Don’t forget my new business that lets you make websites from Google sheets for some reason

.. what do you mean they revoked our API key?

>Video unavailable This video is not available.

Unacceptable!

Ughhhhhhh.

Nice one.

Is DHH's Hey doing well? I couldn't really see the value in it because I handle my emails quite decently.

Signed up and reserved my email.

hilarious... well done

It's for horses.

got me

haha this is funny

Why is this flagged? This is great and, for better or worse, pretty on point.

I know!! I mean like, come on, take a joke, internet

You know what makes a great timing joke?

Some people just hate fun

The fact that hey.com ignored the precedent of ignoring periods within emails will make hey.com emails rife with fraud when they open up. Pretending phishing and email phishing doesn't exist won't make it go away. And I certainly won't spend 2x the amount for an email subscription to reserve my first.last@hey.com vs. firstlast@hey.com

Setting email back 10 years, 1 step at a time

Hey.com isn't interesting and this isn't funny. :(

Ah, so facetious comments are beyond the pale but not low-effort facetious links.

What, pray tell, is intellectually stimulating or useful to curiosity about this website?

For me it’s watching all the responses from the likes of people who don’t get the satire Kvetching right here in the comments.

First mock that showed up shortly after Hey’s introduction was funny, I have to admit that even as a user. Not sure if it did fit on HN but whatever. But this is not only low effort, but what’s there to discuss? Is it really that interesting?

Is anything interesting?

Do you have a link?

https://bye.fyi/

How is this low effort? Probably tens of hours went into this.

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