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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

> For example, I worked with the NBA to let fans text messages onto the Jumbotron. The technology worked great, but let me tell you, no amount of regular expressions stands a chance against a 15 year old trying to text the word “penis” onto the Jumbotron.

incredible

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I'll be honest: I'm 38 years old, and I think it's pretty funny to get "penis" up on the Jumbotron. I don't think I'd do it, but I would certainly have a good laugh if I witnessed it.

Let's do a search for the threshold age. I'm 26, and I'd probably do it.

50 here. Would be down to see a jumbo penis.

I wrote the article and I think it's funny

I am 41, and I would find it terribly offensive. There can be children watching and...

No. Just kidding, I'd find it funny.

I'm a mature adult and find such childishness stupid.

I'm a mature adult and find such childishness refreshing and needed in this world.

Mature adults don't call other people childish.

They might hold the opinion, but they also recognize a few things like how that is a matter of taste, and how tastes differ, and how that's ok and there is no one true taste, and if there were it would be inexcusable to assume that they embodied it, and aside from all of that even given poor taste, the importance of decorum is context sensitive, there are almost no absolutes and there is at least a few times & places for things that are normally unwanted, etc etc etc.

Also, if a 15 year old really did come with the somewhat self-referential hack "the PEN IS mightier than the sword", I can only tip my hat to them !

That's great! It won't stop people, myself included, from having a mini-flashback to childhood by doing something childish, but you're welcome to sit right next to me, being mad about it. :)

Naw it’s an ageless thing, good old tomfoolery is always fun.

Just hire a censor, for crying out loud, the NBA can afford it and it doesn't need to scale.

If you read the article you may note that this is exactly what happened

Yes and no. They first tried paying engineers to do it instead. They probably paid those engineers more, to fail, than they ultimately paid the censors.

That also fails: https://taskandpurpose.com/culture/minnesota-vikings-johnny-...

If it hadn't been called out in the media, how many people would have caught onto that?

enough for it to get called out by the media

He's wearing the old camo pattern which hasn't be used in decades, which any military veteran would cue in on.

There is no indication of of the date of the photo. The tweet even mentions "looking up to" implying they may be an older role model. That photo could have easily been taken decades ago.

Maybe we just assume digital photo = digital age and everything posted is recent?

You wouldn't have that objection if it was an old black and white grainy photo with the same out of date pattern.

Reminds me of my favorite comedian: "One time, this guy handed me a picture of him, he said 'Here's a picture of me when I was younger.' Every picture is of you when you were younger."

"and the picture of you when you were youngest is also the oldest picture of you"

I don't think "filter out texts that look like they might be blatant sexual puns or inappropriate for a jumbotron" is on the same level as "filter out images in a promotion of militarist culture that depict people whom the military might not want to be associated with". I doubt most people (including journalists) would have known the image was a prank if there weren't articles written about the prank after it was pointed out in a way that journalists found out about. On the other hand getting the word "penis" or a slur on the jumbotron is intentionally somewhat obvious.

I actually think the example of a porn actor being mistaken for a soldier is rather harmless (although it will offend exactly the kind of crowd that thinks a sports event randomly "honoring" military personnel is good and normal). I recall politicians being tricked into "honoring" far worse people in pranks like this just because someone constructed a sob story about them using a real picture. The problem here is that filtering out the "bad people" requires either being able to perfectly identify (i.e. already know) every single bad person or every single good person.

A reverse image search is a good gut check but if the photo itself doesn't have any exact matches you rely on facial recognition which is too unreliable. You don't want to turn down a genuine sob story because the guy just happens to look like a different person.

That's an acceptable failure. The only people who know that guy are into porn already.

I know, because the linked article told me.

(In this case, I don't care. But the pearl-clutching type might.)

"Safe to say the Vikings social media team is going to be thinking long and hard..."

those last 3 words genuinely accidental?

I mean… that’s hardly offensive though. That’s not on the same level as a racial slur or something.

Just let clever 15 year olds write "penis" on the jumbotron, for crying out loud!

Talk to the advertisers

It's really not that clever.

it's all relative to the cohort.

if the rest of his classmates are drooling and eating chaulk the kid that gets the jumbotron to be lewd is pretty clever.

And?

That wouldn't be nearly as funny as putting up a bit of a fight.

And those 15 year olds need an outlet to let them prove that they are clever.

Yeah there is two parts. One is showing the stupidity of unfiltered content by anyone.

And other one is showing filtering is impossible...

Both are funny... And kinda prove that you can not allow input from public.

The parent post is talking about hiring professional censors, which strikes me as caring a bit too much about the jokes of a 15yo.

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