Engineering Festivus | Hacker News Reader

Engineering Festivus

festivus.dev

175 pointsnixcraft33 comments

Costanza would the be the one who gets into tech (by lying to investors), makes it big, then blows everything up (because he has no idea what he's doing). Kramer would offer George some help, in exchange for all of his shares in the company. Kramer proceeded to clean up the mess George left, then offload the entire company to private equity for an undisclosed sum.

The episode would close with Kramer sitting at a table, facing the camera, smoking a cigar, shaking hands with a whole crew of men, who aren't facing the camera, but look distinctly like a few famous tech people, Branson, Gates, Cuban, etc

In some alternative universe, the whole Costanza/Yankees plot is replaced by a Costanza/Apple plot, and George is frequently sitting in front of a manically gesticulating Steve Jobs head with the voice of Larry David.

"There is nothing more satisfying after typing than looking down and seeing just a screen!"

Canonically, George made millions by inventing 'iLoo', so you can find a toilet wherever you may be, and did not defraud investors or poorly manage his company, but in fact was merely a victim himself of Madoff.

Kramer would most likely become a billionaire in crypto.

They used to call me "Costanza" when I worked in aviation, because I would occasionally take a nap in the comfortable seats in the mockup jets at the Customer Service Center. That was back when I wore suits, and one time a group of unaccompanied buyers woke me up. I recovered enough to half convince them to buy a mid-level jet (I was a software dev), I was arranging a test drive when the real salesman came in and ran me off.

I also had a kind of Seinfeld "soup nazi" story. When I was an undergraduate studying electrical engineering at Columbia in the late '80s, my friend and I were commiserating in the dorm about our girlfriend problems. I was living in the Barnard women's dorm as an exchange student from CU, and there was a nearby pizza place known for horrible service and extra-rude waiters. I guess we decided to wallow in our misery, because we went there that night to see if the stories were true.

At first, we were greeted normally, seated and our order for a pizza taken by a nice woman. An hour later, a guy came out with a pizza, with heavy smoke pouring from it. He looked almost exactly like the soup nazi in Seinfeld, same mean look on his face. He dumped the charred pizza on the table and said, "It's a little well done. That is OK, isn't it?" Little did he know about our girlfriend problems, we were feeling a little mean ourselves, we both glared back at him--with the look like not getting a tip is going to be the least of his problems if he didn't bake us a new one. The replacement pizza was really good.

NYC at that time really was like the one in Seinfeld, neurotic and off the rails. I was a poor student, so I didn't get to eat at pizzerias or diners much, but I did stop by Tom's a few times. It was much different inside, dingier and not so yuppie. They just used the exterior shot in the show. The service was OK, too.

[edit]

I just remembered--I'm not making this up, really--I used to have a blue puffy down jacket like George when I lived in New York. I wonder if my classmates thought back to me when they saw the one on Seinfeld?

I’m sure the niche is quite small, but if the Seinfeld crew did shorts like this for real, I would pay so much money for the privilege of watching them

I have wondered how feasible it would be to update Seinfeld segments with deepfakes. Have Kramer spin in and go on about NFTs and whatnot. It would obviously be instantly banned everywhere but might be funny.

Or have them recite Reddit or HN threads or something.

I appreciate the loop from the HN Dropbox reference skit: https://festivus.dev/hacker-news-comments/

He's played the comical part of slick startup investor "Freak Masterstroke" in the new mst3k series:

https://mst3k.fandom.com/wiki/Freak_Masterstroke

"Where's my second-screen experience!"

These are hilarious. Is it a meta-joke that a series of videos about over-complicated technology are only visible if one allows JavaScript and embedded Twitter posts?

"What's the deal with React? I don't get it. Am i right people?"

"Why do they call it React? The UI is slow, the experience is slow...they should call it 'Protract!'"

The Hacker News comments was so accurate! I'm having so much fun going through Seinfeld shorts.

This feels like a distillation of my entire life up till now.

I lost it at the conclusion of the editor argument one.

I mean it's clearly superior. You can see all your files right there on the left!

I need to clone their voices on FakeYou.com and give this person API access. This is a great concept. It needs audio to sell it.

A bit off-topic but since many Seinfeld fans are here...

Here's something I discovered here on HN and want to share: https://watchseinfeld.net/

Repurposing Seinfeld reminds me the (in)famous 9/11 spec script: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12223790

I can feel the plot of "Automating Simple Things" in my bones.

We've all been there. But it still hurts.

Not sure if I’m missing something but all I see on that link is the title at the top and then a list of unrelated articles?

(I’m on an iPhone)

Edit: ok I was missing something; clicking on any of the links. Never mind.

now if only someone piped these through TacoTron to get output similar to the standup routine [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1onxri0duN0

That's gold Jerry! Gold!

Getting some jery get ipad vibes from this.

That and the 9/11 spec script[0] have ruined all other attempts at updating Seinfeld for me.

[0] https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B50l484pDaMobXI2Wk5CX0NMbkU...

when i play the clips - can't hear sound on any of the clips. do I need to have a twitter account to hear the audio?

There is no audio because the original cast of Seinfeld has not come back to record new dialogue about tech. We can only dream.

Awesome idea, but not sure if these are funny though :/

There is little in life more subjective than humor. These are spreading like wildfire on reddit this week, and now they've shown up here. I'd say it's safe to assume these "are funny," at least to someone.

Have you ever watched Seinfeld? The subtitles don't do them justice, the delivery is really part of the context for the humour.

> Have you ever watched Seinfeld?

There's a good chance that people from other countries (which is most of the world) haven't. I only knew that show existed because of a TVTropes page (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunn...), and that page is the only thing I'd seen about that show until today.

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