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Comment by jankotek | Hacker News Reader

Why should people care about some 50 year old obscure cultural references? It is not 1980ies, when 99% unix users were from western culture.

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I spent an hour trying to work out what was wrong with a system. Files had timestamps from 1985, and I couldn't see where they were coming from.

NPM turned out to be the source, with (this time) an American cultural reference: https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/20439

I would much prefer 1 January 1970, 1 January 2000, or some other date that is clearly a placeholder.

Sharing between cultures is a positive thing. And you don't have to care, it's just an easter egg after all - but let others onjoy it.

Presumably because the programmer likes that element of western culture. Are programmers supposed to conduct a poll among global stakeholders before they implement an easter egg?

This reminds me some review or article i read many years ago about OS/2 2.0 (the one before Warp) that wrote something along the lines of IBM tried to use a color palette that would be appropriate for all cultures around the world and ended up making a user interface with colors that looked very bland for everyone :-P

Oh come on, ABBA was probably the most global phenomenon ever coming out of Europe. Everybody is an ABBA fan, even if they haven't discovered it yet ;)

I’m in my late 30s and have never understood the Abba obsession. I’ve heard some of their music and it doesn’t really do it for me. And the weird way everyone acts about Abba, like you see in this thread, just reinforces that for me.

It's probably at least partly a 'you had to be there' situation to remember how popular, globally, that band was back in the 70's. The fact that they weren't from the US or UK made them stand out even more.

Because you might learn something new and learning is fun? FWIW I'm from a western country and didn't understand the reference.

Maybe. But I prefer to keep my fun separate from my production software.

You should demand a refund on your man SaaS subscription!

I like seeing reflections of creators’ personalities in code. It’s a little reminder to not take myself so seriously, to remember that these artificial systems called computers were totally created by humans and finally, that creativity in code is one of the human essences imbued in these systems.

I wonder if AI’s will create Easter eggs in their creations? Would they see them as a form of play, or only as a form of waste? What would that say about the eventual differences between a human and an artificial mind?

Abba is European and extremely popular all over the world. It has nothing to do with "western culture".

Ouch, right in the nationalistic ego centre!

Swedish, please.

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