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Comment by VBprogrammer | Hacker News Reader

It makes me laugh now that Easter eggs were a thing. Can you imagine getting that past code review these days? And it makes you wonder, if those were the kind of things you could get included imagine how easy a inconspicuous privilege escalation bug would be to slip in.

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Nah, Easter eggs can still totally be a thing. It's not necessarily something that a developer sneaks in alone, it can be something a whole team in agrees on.

I guess they're less of a thing now because it's been done so much, and with Internet everyone is immediately aware of it, they're not as fun as in the past.

Android for example had multiple easter eggs, when you go the phone information and tap multiple times on the version number you get an animation.

In /r/teslamotors users often complain that the company spends too much effort on easter eggs.

I’m sure that if the Tesla team could launch real full self driving instead of coding up the easter eggs, they would have done, but some people just don’t understand that it’s not the same amount of effort.

If anything, Easter eggs became as pervasive as April's fools jokes and turning your logo rainbow during June. 37 years is a record, but an Easter egg shouldn't be something everyone knows and that is everywhere.

I strongly recommend watching "Dave's Garage" on YouTube. He gives a pretty interesting insight in how code was built and easter eggs were added in his Windows NT days. He's also the same MSFT employee who created the task manager and ported the Pinball game onto Windows XP.

They have some great Reddit threads:

I wrote Task Manager and I just remembered something... https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/gqb915/i_wrote...

AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/kfpjhg/i_am_dave_plum...

I don't think a privilege escalation bug in Windows 1.0 would be of much value.

Especially that there are no privileges to escalate...

Can you imagine getting that past code review these days?

I can, yes. Easter eggs aren't some clever thing that a developer sneakily included. They're just features that aren't documented. They go through planning, dev, QA, etc like everything else.

I can't imagine the flight simulator in Excel went through planning and QA.

>They go through planning, dev, QA, etc like everything else.

And the product owner agrees spending half of the sprint points on Easter eggs. :)

It was a problem even at the time, as Easter eggs took up a fair amount of memory on microcomputers. The famous WAIT6502,10 in Microsoft BASIC Easter egg would be removed by some vendors: https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20220128-microsoft-commodor...

I'm not sure Microsoft did formal code review at the time, by the way. Windows was the first time its rather informal development practices became a liability.

Firefox has easter eggs AND visible credits. The former I won’t tell. The latter is about:credits.

I think Easter eggs should still be included, but they should be listed in the "Easter Eggs" section of the documentation. Most people won't bother reading the documentation so the effect will be close enough.

Every Android version has a unique easter egg (repeatedly tapping something in the Developer menu). It is still very much a thing, but a lot rarer.

Have you already found your shark in your Opel/Vauxhall interior?

Easter eggs are still a thing, in software and even in production cars.

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