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Comment by mzajc | Hacker News Reader

I love this kind of tongue-in-cheek steganography. In a similar vein: Vermont Inmates Hide Image Of Pig On Police Decals (https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2012/02/03/146358114...)

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> "'This is not as offensive as it would have been years ago. We can see the humor,' said Public Safety Commissioner Keith Flynn, a former state trooper and state prosecutor who was named commissioner a year ago. 'If the person had used some of that creativeness, he or she would not have ended up inside.'"

I read (and re-read, and re-read) the book You Can't Win on recommendation of a HN user. It's about a thief from the late 1800s-early 1900s, and the crimes he and his thief buddies did were pretty creative. A lot of crime is more brute-force than clever, but people can do some pretty interesting things if they want something and don't care if they lose everything.

> You Can't Win

It's pretty entertaining!

And free to read for anyone interested: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/69404

Standard Ebooks does a nice job of typesetting and proofreading many of the Project Gutenberg books, including this one.

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/jack-black/you-cant-win

A hidden pig? I bet some younger cops covet the cars with this logo.

I was once at a military unit where someone hid a golf club in a crest for the door to the officers mess. It was spotted years later. The officers claimed to "never found out who did it", but they also never took it down.

I started reading this because of your comment. Maybe someday I’ll recommend it in a HN thread and some unsuspecting HN reader will come to read it too!

Feel free to email me when your done and tell me what you thought of it :)

I agree for the decal, but the map steganography is at the expense of accuracy. It's less than professional, like adding a small bug to a corner case of your code for a joke.

I only skimmed the pictures in the article but the ones I saw could have no plausible impact on navigation. They are buried within tiny details that are essentially artistic anyway, there is no impact on accuracy possible.

Not none, just very little, like the obscure code corner case. If you are thinking about building something nearby, or specifically looking for interesting terrain to visit, you may be misled. The pig shaped cow spot, on the other hand, adds accurate symbology to the decal, with a wholesome helping of self deprecation.

To allow de minimis excursions from ground truth is a necessary compromise, but purposely introducing them isn't.

Oh please.

Anyone looking to actually do something interesting with a piece of land is going to have to a much higher resolution map of the site, not use the extreme zoom and on a map covering a huge area.

Or they may even go rogue and visit the place! Heavens to Murgatroyd!

Yes, I hate when I'm halfway up the north face of the Eiger and my map just shows a spider.

I don't think the effect would be serious. I have plotted explorations of the wilderness off topo maps--and I always head out perfectly well knowing that the map isn't a sufficiently accurate representation of reality to actually trust it. The flatter the terrain on the map the more likely it will prove passable on the ground but features can be small enough to not show, yet make it impractical to get through.

It’s 2025. Nobody is looking at a hand-drawn map for accuracy.

You may well need to in the Alps. If the satellite map only shows it snow-covered and you need to know what's beneath, hand-drawn it is.

The modern equivalent of these maps is the ‘terrain’ layer, not the ‘satellite’ layer.

You are either trolling, or utterly clueless when it comes to fell walking.

(Perhaps sir would like to search 'Ordnance Survey Maps').

Trap streets and fake towns are far worse than the examples shown here.

For something like a glacier, whose face is changing constantly anyway, who could even say if it didn't look like a marmot for a while? That whole part of the map could just say "glacier face" and be cross-hatched since it's unknowable at the time of publication, but that's no fun.

Adding fun to an information stream degrades the signal for non-fun payloads. As a rule I prefer maximum signal to noise in reference materials.

I've found this is an amazingly high conflict subject in life. I once had to manage someone that was one of those people that did things like these mappers. It drove me insane. I constantly had to tell them to redo their work. They loved trying to insert Simpsons(TV SHOW) references into everything. I had a serious talk with them about the fact that you cannot do things that are "fun" if it conflicts with the work accuracy/reliability/readability/maintainability. They never listened and I had to manage them out. One of only two employees I had to get rid of in my career, so far.

I really don't understand these types and why they think its "harmless" to do this type of stuff. I don't want to create potentially more work for myself and I definitely don't want people that work for me to do so.

I've also worked with people that did this many times. It seems to be something like 5-10% of the working population that has this weird near neurotic compulsion to do this sort of "funny-sabotage" at work and cannot seem to resist even at the cost of their job.

You say you don't understand these types & that this is a high conflict subject for you. To offer a perspective, I think it has to do with how individuals cope with their existence. In every moment, we could be doing something more worthy of existence; worse, most of our life is sacrificed to working that definitely does not meet such lofty criteria. So take these small, but irrational acts just as minor self-therapy (vs rebellion) that is constructive to the individual -- hopefully it does not do any serious harm (I trust your judgement you made the right call).

I wager this is going to become more and more common as humanity cries against the hyper-specialization and hyper-inferred MEANING on work that may be trivial in scope when juxtaposed that we really only know that ourselves our conscious (or choose your word for whatever illusion we're experiencing). I imagine there exists at least 1 UBER phd gig worker who did not fully take seriously the annotative training work he or she was doing, if you're familiar with that article that made rounds recently.

People also change with age, and perhaps in 20 years you may find yourself doing these same things. Or, maybe now, coping differently in different ways, but that people find equally incomprehensible -- I know I do.

Just mean the above for good, seriously.

What if it didn't conflict with the accuracy/etc? If you need names for an example scenario and Alice and Bob are already used elsewhere, what would be wrong with Bart and Lisa?

what would be wrong with with not doing what you were asked not to do by whoever is paying you?

if I'm forced to agree with you that some bending of the rules will be allowed, why don't we bend them in the other direction, toward wasting your time or defacing your stuff? "sorry, we're going to have to cancel your vacation because I think it's funny to do that. use the time to repaint your car that I spray-painted my intials on. hahahaha can't you take a joke?"

Ah yes, signal, the spice of life.

Applications have had easter eggs for ages.

https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio...

I believe jokes inserted into code that dont impact user experience negatively are called easter eggs, not bugs

If these details were harmful, don't you think it would take less than sixty years to discover them?

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