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Comment by krick | Hacker News Reader

I hate such "jokes" so much. I just need to say it. Obviously, me saying that won't change anything, I don't even believe there is a minor possibility that anyone reading this may remember it in the future and know better than doing something like that, but, really, I hate it so, so, so much. As if there's not enough semi-intended weird behaviors in all our systems. Of course, I won't pretend that I believe that if not for the things like that we could live in a world where technology actually exists to save our time, not to spend more time on maintaining technology. What a silly idea. The majority of people on this forum only exist to maintain the technology.

But still, there's no more mind-numbing, infuriating, exhausting feeling, than to find out that a thing you were debugging for the last hour was supposed to be a "fun little joke". Fun? You know what's fun: when stuff just works. That's about the most fun thing there is.

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You’re so intense about it, I just want that there would be more right now !

Generally people make way to much assumption about software behavior «just work» is easily confused with «works as I personally expected»

You’re assuming too much, expecting too much, and get frustrated. I don’t think you deserve it, but I don’t think you have the right mindset about it either.

Let’s not downvote the guy to oblivion.

He is somewhat right. I think Easter eggs belong in computer games and user facing stuff like website or online forum.

There shouldn’t be jokes in something like man or grep.

Yes, he and you should not be downvoted, I agree, I fully understand how one can want to never be bothered by others playfulness.

But I'm in the team that software is made by people, and that should be reflected. Jokes, like always, must be respectful to strangers, and strangers have to be polite and allow others to express themselves, jokes are not a trap.

There definitely should be jokes in man and grep, it's just have to be of good taste (this one was good). We're not in a high stake diplomatic field. Removing all the jokes by principle is just giving in to the great consensus leveler that crushes humanity. Embrace humanity, don't crush it.

Is man not user facing?

If we define users as a subset of all users - by gamers and people who only visit websites or use web apps.

But I expected it could be inferred from my post.

There are literally dozens of easter eggs in VMS/OpenVMS, while DEC were many things, and failed at the market ultimately, I don't think anyone accused them of being unprofessional.

> The majority of people on this forum only exist to maintain the technology.

That’s quite a belief and would certainly affect how you perceive easter eggs.

It depends on the particular easter egg. In this case, well, printing "gimme gimme gimme" after midnight is not that hard to catch and from what I understand it doesn't affect the basic functionality. I prefer to think of it as a kind reminder that software is written by humans, at least from the time being.

This is OSS. So it is impossible to have a rational discussion on it here—OSS has the halo of No Warranties And If You Complain You Are Entitled. Including intentionally adding things that turn to break things in the most puzzling, Heisenbug-looking way.[1]

[1] It doesn’t work after midnight???

HN is obviously not where you’ll find people sympathetic to this point of view, but in the grander scheme of things, the no-Easter-eggs attitude won out

The no-Easter-egg attitude ‘won out’c sure. There’s not much else you can conclude from that, though. Not even that it’s the popular opinion.

Nothing more frustrating than being so offended, so easily.

Software bugs out sometimes. You cannot assume that everything will work as you expect even without easter eggs like this.

If this triggers you so much then maybe, just maybe you chose the wrong career path. You know, all that "if you can't stand the heat, get out of kitchen. If you can't stand the debugging, ...." ;-)

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