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Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

Interesting, but the analysis is a bit short. This was posted to Reddit five months ago with more discussion:

https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/2uzas7/i_found_out_th...

They found (as I did, with a simple Google reverse image search) that the image was used to illustrate a Forbes article in 2011:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/venessamiemis/2011/04/04/the-ban...

https://twitter.com/EricaGlasier/status/563770191440404480

Doesn't actually answer the question, but the source of the image is I think super relevant.

I could sort of imagine some automated process making Imgur thumbnails of images from links shared on some social media site, and going awkwardly self-recursive and getting to 3.2M.

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Interesting speculation:

"Sorry to be boring, but Webdriver Torso already gave us the answer: it's a test image used in integration tests of Imgur itself. Silly image."

https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/2uzas7/i_found_out_th...

We do this on our CDN stuff as well which pokes it all on S3.

Our test image is creepy as fuck: http://i.imgur.com/GiTqw00.jpg

That's a pretty funny parody of BBC Test Card F: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_Card_F

I remember at school the TV was wheeled in and the class was told we were going to watch something. Whatever the programme was, it wasn't on and we got the test card. The headmaster popped his head in and told us all to watch it carefully as the girl will draw on the board at the end.

We all watched it for what felt like hours. Strangest day ever.

Yep that's the one. It was done by Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt under the guise of The Mighty Boosh.

Which you may recognize as the show behind Old Gregg

At least here in the US, Old Gregg is pretty well known outside of The Mighty Boosh. It went around independently as a viral video a few years ago and wasn't directly associated with The Mighty Boosh.

I'm in the US, and that's why I mentioned it... because it's so popular on its own, not many people realize it's from the Mighty Boosh or any show for that matter.

For some reason, I was unable to reply to petercooper's comment earlier. This was meant for him.

A "few"... it's almost 10 years old.

Please don't remind me of the quick and inevitable passing of time towards nothingness. That's a disrespectful thing to do on a Friday morning.

Is Old Gregg otherwise famous separate from the show?

In the US, most people just know the viral video of it and don't realize it's actually from a show

A well communicative dummy image.

At a former job, our standard test image was the jellollama GIF.

That was a reference to this channel YouTube uses for testing: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsLiV4WJfkTEHH0b9PmRklw

So it's the same as the twist in the movie Amelie...

Life imitates art!

why would they have test data in production?

The 3.2 million number is highly suggestive:

    3263847/(365*6*24)
    = 62

It sounds like they've been running an integration test which uploads an image once per minute for pretty much their entire existence (they're a little over 6 years old.)

This is sensible. It's the only way to get instant feedback when the site stops working for any reason.

The sampling was done only for the old-style 5 character URLs. They've since moved to 7 character URLs. Depending on how that 3.2 million number was reached, you maybe should be calculating rate using just the time they were at 5 character URLs. I don't know when the switch occurred though.

When you get big enough monitoring and integration testing start to look pretty similar. The most reliable kind of monitoring is the kind that actually uses your system, end-to-end.

On that topic, never name your child "TEST" if you ever plan to take them to the doctor or hospital...

Why would they not be testing production?

I guess it makes sense for their case, since who cares an image was uploaded by integration test or it was "real user" generated.

so that you can test production

Seems like the placeholder isn't supposed to be accessed through imgur interface. Only if you type random letters you'll see it.

Also this answer from Imgur (via same thread):

"@nourishedcloud if we told you, we'd have to kill you"

https://twitter.com/imgurAPI/status/563792055651270656

Definitely some test image.

From the Forbes article: In the longer term, Facebook Credits could become truly disruptive by becoming a currency for peer to peer lending, microtransactions, and for usage by the unbanked in emerging markets around the world.

It's amazing how much utter tripe gets written and published about this sort of stuff.

Just dug up these links too. This comment on the Reddit thread may explain why https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/2uzas7/i_found_out_th...

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