Hacker News Reader

Comment by AceJohnny2 | Hacker News Reader

When I worked on an early SoC with a display on the dev-board, our test software didn't do anything with the display. Depending on the last state of the system, the display usually had a bunch of ugly LCD noise on it.

Eventually I got around to implementing a rudimentary framebuffer to send to the display. Wondering what to display, I figured I'd compute a Mandelbrot fractal!

People liked it, and I was happy to have made our dev systems a little less ugly.

I went to work on other things for a few months. When I came back, they had replaced my fractal with the company logo :\

(I suspect, but don't know the codec, that the jpeg used to store the company logo ended up using more space and cycles-per-pixel than my fractal)

View on HN

I put googly eyes on the men and women figures on the bathroom signs once.

HR sent out a series of painful to read HR speak emails where they chastised whomever did it, implied just about everything you could imagine ... all while saying nothing at all.

Whimsy can be dangerous.

Those ANIMALS drawing attention to our definitely not weird signs!

> HR sent out a series of painful to read HR speak emails where they chastised whomever did it, implied just about everything you could imagine ... all while saying nothing at all.

If HR cares and has time to do that it’s a sign, there's fat to trim in the organization. I’m sure your investors would be thrilled to learn that.

We need more whimsy in life in general and at the office more-so.

We do, but it's easy for whimsy to go too far. Googly eyes on a poster is cute. Graffiti everywhere isn't.

When one person does it, it's a clever surprise. When many people do it, it quickly becomes tedious and repetitious. It's interesting only when it's done judiciously. It's even worse when it escalates, such as with vandalism, or cruelty, or shock. And one person's "whimsy" can easily become "what, can't you take a joke?"

So I can see why an HR department would want to say, "Yes, the was very cute, the first time. Please don't turn it into a problem".

Although frustrating and disappointing to hear, that certainly sounds like the perfect sort of opportunity to surreptitiously upload slightly altered versions of the company logo.

Slightly mismatched colors.

Bassic mispelings.

Logo rotated by 4 to 5 degrees.

Overlay a semi-transparent competitor logo for a single frame.

Etc.

> Overlay a semi-transparent competitor logo for a single frame.

I have to ask: is this serious or not? While extremely funny, are you guys all working for places where this is not potentially billions in damages?

Sounds like it was only on dev boards, not going out to production.

Dev work often finds curious ways to production.

Famous last words.

We had a call center with an 18 screen Hiperwall. The manager was a little OCD. Each viewport was completely configurable and modifiable.

I may have left it for awhile with each viewport rotated by a degree...maybe two.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com