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Show HN: Browser plugin that turns 'disrupt' into 'bullshit'

chrome.google.com

91 pointsturtleherder72 comments

Love this! I'd also love to see a plugin which replaces the disgusting term "growth hacking" with its actual meaning - "marketing".

I'd like to see "metrics" replaced with "measurements" – metrics is the theory of measurement, not the measurements themselves.

I wonder how the community over at addons.mozilla.org (AMO) feels when they see something like this. On one hand, there's a sense of "We'll never see any playful plugins like this because our approval process is slower than Apple's and less well defined."

On the other hand, their garden is well groomed while the Chrome Web Store has a lot of noise...

But Mozilla didn't lock their browser down to only install addons from their own app site. So you can load addons from any developer's own web site (or any other site), which is what usually happens for toy stuff like this. e.g. https://github.com/DaveRandom/cloud-to-butt-mozilla

Chrome lets you install .crx extensions on your own too, although it's harder.

Not that I like the proprietary Chrome or the fauxpen Chromium...

How? I followed the instructions on this page https://plus.google.com/+PatrickAljord/posts/LiiabJQ6hvG and they don't work. And that's from late last year.

Not allowed anymore on Windows. https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2811969

They will also warn you a few browser restarts later that the extension may be malicious and disable it for you. I know this, because I used to make my own extensions, distribute them as .crx files, and people would use them. Now they keep getting disabled. The only way around it is to list them on the chrome store. You can have an unlisted entry on the chrome store which is free, but they will remain in control of your private keys and update process. And of course they will know that the extension exists and who uses it.

The only way around this, apparently, is to install the developer edition of Chrome, which means being plagued with bugs and possible security risks. Splendid.

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2811969

Woah what the fuck. Thank God I don't have to use this crappy browser except for a few pages that break in FF.

Yes, I used to be an avid Chrome user but recently feel like it has becoming less and less pleasant.

What's not open about Chromium, out of interest?

It's still pretty tied to Google; the routine reminders to "sign in with your Google account!" are one aspect of that.

That said, it's still pretty open as well, and being FOSS, it's certainly doable for there to be a fork (if there isn't one already) that strips out everything Google-related.

You're thinking of Google Chrome, Chromium[0] is the open-source project behind Google Chrome, they're different, and Chromium is tied less to Google.

[0]: http://www.chromium.org/

No, I'm thinking of Chromium. I use Chromium rather regularly. Last I checked, the various prompts for me to log in with my Google account when starting up a fresh install of Chromium aren't my hallucinations.

All these plugins that do word-replacing should evolve like Adblock: a single plugin controlled by external lists.

Yup. One of the other commenters suggested checking into Greasemonkey, but it's only for Firefox. Something could be created with a build step that creates the plugins for multiple browsers.

Sanitazi

http://userscripts-mirror.org/scripts/review/129877.html

Tampermonkey

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tampermonkey/dhdgf...

petition to add word 'pivot'.

countdown until an addon with 'cloud', 'disrupt' , and 'pivot' functionality initiated.

Let's add some more:

  lean
  vertical
  arena
  ninja
  rockstar

It'd be nice to have a plugin that masks all of the lame business-speak on the internet...

You need to suggest what those words should map to, otherwise, what are we suppose to do with them? Map them to bullshit also? That would make the article not necessarily make sense.

I propose the following:

lean -> no money

startup -> small business

disrupt -> survive

vertical -> business

arena -> business

ninja -> obedient intern

rockstar -> young and naive

growth-hackers -> salesmen

cloud -> rental servers

social media -> facebook clone

analytics -> number crunching

Consider the following sentence translation:

"We are a lean cloud-based startup looking to disrupt the analytics arena in the social media vertical, we are looking for growth-hackers who are also ninja programmers and rockstar coders."

Maps to:

"We are a no-money rental-server-based small business looking to survive the number crunching business in the facebook clone business, we are looking for salesmen who are also obedient intern programmers and young and naive coders."

But I already have "cloud" mapped to "butt". I'm conflicted now.

closures to the rescue...

    var dict = {
            'disrupt': 'bullshit',
            'growth hacking': 'marketing',
            'rockstar': 'arrogant jerk',
            'ninja': '2cool4u',
            'guru': 'knowitall',
            'lean': 'cheap',
            'startup': 'small business',
            'social media': 'facebook clone',
            'FREE': 'free',
            'cloud': (function () {
                var a = [
                    'rental servers',
                    'butt'
                ];
                return a[Math.floor(Math.random() * a.length)];
            }) ()
        };

How about downcase all instances of FREE?

This plugin is so bullshitive.

EDIT: Hey it works!

I am really digging this trend.

Silly, but I think still generally more useful that the people who seriously use the term "disrupt" when talking about their big ideas.

That is one disruptive plugin.

It is so unfortunate that bullshitive is not a word...

The plugin actually contains a large number of rules for different forms of the word 'disrupt'. Try it and see. For instance, both the words 'disruption' and 'disruptive' become 'bullshit'.

This comment makes no sense once you have the plugin installed, and that's wonderful.

you just made it into one!

I see where you're coming from, but to be a little pedantic– bullshit is both a noun and an adjective, so you can simply say "that is one bullshit plugin" and you'd be fine.

The best thing i saw in a month. simply awesome, might force me to move from Safari to Chrome :)

Or, make a Safari version! If there's enough interest and no one else does it, I'll get around to that at some point.

I'd stick to Firefox and Chrome. They're both widely used and fully cross-platform (Windows, Mac and Linux). Desktop Safari is kind of the modern-day IE in that it's artificially tied to a single OS (Apple dumped the Windows version of Safari a couple years ago with no notice leaving users in a lurch).

What is really needed is a plugin for turning "beautiful" into "ordinary"... It really distrupts me when companies/people puts " beautiful interface" as one of the features of their app/site/whatnot.

Does chrome also have a cloud to butt plugin? If so it may become my main browser (again).

Yes, it does. But both Disrupt to Bullshit and Cloud to Butt are available for Firefox as well, if you don't want to switch. Disrupt to Bullshit's Firefox link is not searchable yet, but it's https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disrupt-to-bu...

thank you very much!

After "cloud to butt" and "disrupt to bullshit" how long until there's an arbitrary regex replacement addon for Chrome/Firefox so we can stop writing new plugins and just add new replacements?

I've actually been giving that a lot of thought while writing this. It wouldn't be too difficult.

Although as I have learned, verbs are quite a bit more involved than nouns. I think I have something close to a generalized API for verbs at this point. I'll be polishing it up more this weekend.

It has been around for many years. It's called Greasemonkey.

Thanks for the tip. I'll check that out.

Downworthy?

Quick and dirty greasemonkey version for firefox: https://gist.github.com/kennethrapp/571d5d8e2d9c875d27be

Nice. I have also put a version of Disrupt to Bullshit up on Firefox's add-on store already: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disrupt-to-bu...

But I initially didn't spread the word about it as much as for the Chrome one because as previous commenters have noted, the Firefox one is under review for 10 days, and before that it's not a searchable page.

Turns out mine replaces the href inside links too... so that's annoying.

It should not do that. If it does, there's a bug. Can you tell me what page you're looking at?

EDIT: Oh, you mean the actual text inside the "a" tag? Yes, the plugin will change that in its current form. It would be pretty trivial to not have it do that. I will add that next. In the meantime, I don't think the link itself will be affected -- even now, you should be able to click on it and it will go to the right place.

Sorry.. I was talking about my script. I was just lazy with the regex but I fixed it, although it's still a bit buggy.

We need to start working toward a generic plugin for word replacement so that I can merge this with my existing s/cloud/butt and s/keyboard/leopard substitutions.

Yes. I think it should consist of two independent modules. The first would be the basic mechanism for creating the plugin, walking the node, and doing the text conversion, which would just be a function you could pass in. Then it would have a build step to make Chrome and FireFox extensions.

Or maybe you would want to pass in a series of regexp replacement pairs there, but even that is too limiting, I think. You might want to do something based on information about the whole node, not just the regex

Then the second module would be the good-enough natural language processor. You'd have an API for nouns, one for verbs, etc.

Realizing that these regexes are running each time I open a page makes me realize how far the browsers have come since I've started web programming ...

Totally. It takes about 30-40 milliseconds on a typical news page, and that's after I added a pretty hacky series of brute-force regexps in a panic after I realized that I had been assuming that disrupt is always a transitive verb, but it's increasingly used intransitively these days, especially in the kinds of articles this plugin is meant for.

So the translation, ('We disrupted that industry' => 'We rained bullshit on that industry'), was rendering badly when the verb was used intransitively ('We can't disrupt on our own' => 'We can't rain bullshit on on our own').

The regexps I added have mostly taken care of the problem for the time being, as Chrome auto-updates its extensions in users' browsers. Now the latter sentence above renders 'We can't bullshit on our own.'

Once I reintegrate the new rules into the generalized verb creation function this weekend, it should be a little faster.

"Pivot" replaced with..."we don't know what we're doing."

Open to suggestions. Not feeling clever today.

It should also do these:

rockstar -> arrogant jerk, ninja -> 2cool4u, guru -> know-it-all

I enjoy viewing ad agency sites with this plugin enabled.

This needs to be endorsed by Karl Pilkington.

Beautiful. Thanks for this!

Brilliant

This plugin is interesting as well as this thread because it shows the large portion of minds here think we maybe in a bubble. Meaning, disruptive startups or products are not really so, people are seeing through.

How witty.

(Apologies to anyone with a sarcasm-detecting extension that I just broke).

Why so negative?

If any industry is to call itself disruptive surely it should be ours.

Edit: -4 points and counting but nobody to dispute whether negativity is actually a bad thing or whether the technology industry hasn't been "disruptive". Well okay free-minded people, do your thing.

Think I need that plugin...

Maybe that's true, but the fetishization of 'disruption' is getting a little ridiculous. I'm certainly downloading this.

This fetishizes bullshit.

Tell me when you next launch bullshit product, bro.

I'm sorry, but I work in banking and if 2008-2012 showed us anything, is that we can "disrupt" pretty much the whole economy.

I too would consider finance a very disruptive industry.

If any industry is to call itself disruptive surely it should be ours.

If any industry is arrogant enough to make the locals of the city we move to for work hate us, surely it is ours.

That's a very manipulative comment you've written.

I won't fault you for your opinion that it is arrogance to say that technology is disruptive.

However, I would like to point out that it is technological disruption which causes the economic disruption to previous settlers and this often happen when rent-seekers try to make a profit off a quickly rising class.

It's not "brogrammers arrogance" and words like "disruption" that are driving out the more humble people. It's rising rent which is the problem. The new engineering class has had a tax placed upon it by elites and the original workers are just collateral damage.

Do tech workers really want rising rent? When A raises prices on B and causes C to be driven from a market it is not B's fault for existing or wanting to congregate somewhere in the world.

I don't live in SV. Maybe those people are truly arrogant. Maybe this has everything to do with their arrogance, and nothing to do with the rent-seeking being imposed on them.

I'm not talking about the economic disruption to the city per se, I'm talking about the social arrogance of the people on the ground. Both in general and specifically how they think about the economic changes.

I just get annoyed that people want to shit on tech workers for pushing them out of a city when it's clearly rent-seeking and bad policy that those tech workers have little control over causing the problems.

When firing a gun point it at the right people. Anti-tech sentiment will cause cultural problems without fixing the underlying economic problems. It's sad.

Edit: I'd take a bet that a bunch of mostly introverted nerds don't have anyway as big of an arrogance problem as many other groups might.

In the world outside the tech bubble, being "disruptive" is a bad thing, bringing to mind a bull in a china shop. Inside the bubble, everything claims to be "disruptive" now. The term is as diluted and stained as "synergy", just another word ground into the dirt by the gaggle of suit-and-sandal VCs and startup hawkers.

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