Hacker News' favorite Xkcd comics (2022) | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News' favorite Xkcd comics (2022)

quaxio.com

91 pointsmonort30 comments

I knew 927 was gonna be the top one. It's so useful I sometimes refer to it verbally at work during meetings to great effect.

Yeah, it's kind of funny that "xkcd 927" is almost a verb now.

It's not a verb, it's a standard ;)

Implied. Eg. A new standard for MarkDown!? Will it meet standard of XKCD 927

For me the top 5 will be 927 (Standards), 378 (Emacs), 342 (Internet), 303 (Compiling) and Crypto (386), but not in the order of significance.

On my first 'big' job I printed 927 and posted it on a random blank wall. Recently I visited the office again, even though I haven't worked there for ~2y. Wall is still blank, except for that comic. It brought me joy to know people still see it from time to time.

One way to find an answer on the Internet is to be wrong on the Internet: unless there's a voting system involved.

Click to disagree anonymously, the whole thing is automatic and effortless. You don't have to organize your thoughts when you have a button to express your feelings.

If you are just wrong, and do not actually ask a question, then the responses may be interesting, or not, but they might not answer your original question, which only exists in your own mind, unexpressed, and perhaps not even posed to yourself.

No disagreements with an absence of opinions. Automatic.

No answers to an absence of questions. Effortless.

Surprised not to see Little Bobby Tables make the list. I used to see that everywhere. https://xkcd.com/327/

I would think that the most upvoted comic would be the "most loved", but that was not even considered. Posting is easy, garnering upvotes is the "love" signal.

As is usual with statistics, the methodology greatly affects the outcome.

I think most people would upvote a reference to a xkcd based on how relevant they think it is to the post, not how much they love it.

I would have guessed "Dependency" https://xkcd.com/2347/, but it did not even make the top 10

I've heard people refer to OSS devs as "a random guy in Alaska" before, altough that joke is probably older than the comic.

Possibly because it's newer and had less time to pick up citations.

(author of the blog post) I would have loved to take into account each comic's age and compute some kind of normalization/weight but never got around to doing that. It's hard to do this kind of normalization correctly since HN's population size isn't a constant over time.

This is how I feel about the public NTP pool on which so many IoT devices depend.

Surprised that 949 (File Transfer) didn't make it to top 10

Also "(2022)"

I second that.

I expected 435 Purity to be in the list, but glad to see it in the author's picks:

https://xkcd.com/435/

Fantastic to see the Chess Coaster examples, hilarious, thank you:

https://xkcd.com/chesscoaster/

I had never seen 162 Angular Momentum so well deserved mention for this geek physicist:

https://xkcd.com/162/

Nice honoring of the XKCD byline by mixing romance and physics.

P.S. Is there an XKCD poking fun of the fact that 99% of HN edits are replacing '_' with '*' ?

No, well there should be.

Unintentionally meta: I'd never seen the 3rd-most popular, 1053, "Ten Thousand" before. I love that one.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

One of today's lucky 10'000 -- enjoy!

I gave every new consultant and programmer https://xkcd.com/1205/ when they start. They were all over our building. When asked about fixing some process, I'd pull out my laminated version (one that was enlarged to be 8" square) and I'd ask the two questions.

A lot of "optimizations" didn't get done, and the ones that were huge wins got moved to the front of the line.

I love xkcd. Most of them resonate with me.

However, for some reason #1053 (number three on this list) does not feel right.

Maybe it’s oversimplified. I don’t think linear interpolation works in this case. Most things are learned in bursts at certain ages.

Then again: maybe I’m wrong and need to learn this!

https://xkcd.com/1053/

Maybe you never heard of

https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1053

I think it is funny and amazing, that there is a whole dedicated wiki about xkcd.

(I do not know, whether your concern is adressed there in detail, but probably it is indeed just oversimplification)

I'm pretty sure your right. The math here assumes an equal amount of people learn it each day, but in reality it's weight towards infants, toddlers, children, teens, etc that haven't come across that info yet.

But that doesn't change the validity of the conclusion: When someone doesn't know about something, it's always best to excitedly show them the information than to mock them for not knowing it.

this is a clever idea, nice!

> https://xkcd.com/1357/

This aged very poorly in light of what happened in the midst of the COVID19 pandemic.

OK, I'll bite: What happened to the first amendment in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic?

The government colluding with private companies to censor people.

"Public Service Announcement: The Right to Free Speech means the government can't arrest you for what you say."

Where were people arrested? Or their talk declared illegal?

Visibility on some plattforms was reduced and you can argue, that it is a slippery slope, if government intervention with cooperations that host those plattforms, happens in a nontranparent way. (I do think this was bad, opening ways for secret manipulation)

But people could (and did) continiue to talk about their alternative theories for ages.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com