Great HN parody

People (reddit and elsewhere, internet and elsewhere) have a crippling mental condition where if they haven't experienced a problem on a personal level, it must not exist. It's a glaring logical problem that should be as obvious as the word "NO" on a 500 foot tall, illuminated billboard.

Yet it keeps happening.

davedx• 14 years ago

My favourite: "How I remapped my capslock key to be both ESC and Ctrl" -- maybe should have had VI in there too ;)

If a community can't laugh at itself, then it's surely doomed :D

crowding4• 14 years ago

you know, just two weeks ago I mapped my spacebar to be both space and Meta.

pja2• 14 years ago

I'm on tenterhooks to know how you key Meta-Space now :)

jgrahamc• 14 years ago

I agree. It's important to be able to laugh at ourselves. One of the dangers of the startup world is people taking things way too seriously.

I think that's why my 'double stealth' parody was such a hit a while back: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4166183

DanielBMarkham4• 14 years ago

"double stealth mode" is a classic. Very funny. I'm stealing that one.

Swizec• 14 years ago

Loved re-reading that.

You should write a book ... although too many people would probably take it as serious advice and start following it :/

indiecore2• 14 years ago

awww you changed "15 minutes of uninterrupted eye contact" to "One on One time". The eye contact thing was my favorite part :(

goldfeld• 14 years ago

"YC-backed startup is looking for a growth hacker to help disrupt people's dinners" cracked me up.

kevinyun• 14 years ago

this one did it for me as well!

wlue2• 14 years ago

The funny thing is that I know a few people who do this. (Holding Caps Lock = CTRL, tapping Caps Lock = ESC)

demetrius• 14 years ago

What an excellent idea! If I didn’t use CapsLock for choosing keyboard layout, I would have done this...

djisjke• 14 years ago

How could we not think about this? It's genius!

How is it done? Does your buddy use X, mac or where in the stack is the hack?

terhechte• 14 years ago

I really thought he'd include something about vim: "Controlling VIM 2x fast with toes and my Fingers on two keyboards"

Vivtek• 14 years ago

I'm swooning just from Elon Musk's being parodically referenced.

DanielBMarkham4• 14 years ago

I kept trying to click the upvote button but it didn't work

pivotal• 14 years ago

I could tell it was fake because the Elon Musk link wasn't in the top 3. ;)

wyclif2• 14 years ago

"Latest Daring Fireball Post."

moepstar• 14 years ago

I raise you a "Another boring CloudFlare blogpost full of self-praise".

crowding4• 14 years ago

Latest James Hague and/or Michael O. Church blog.

Nordvind• 14 years ago

Made me smile.

Devilboy• 14 years ago

It's funny because it's true

DanielBMarkham4• 14 years ago

It's missing the "Why I'm leaving HN (This time for good)"

and "A front page HN story about how being on the front page of HN changed my business"

and "A rambling article about how voting is broken on HN"

and "How I lived out of a shoebox and traveled the world on a bicycle while creating my startup"

Anybody interested in more, I refer you to my javascript parody of two years ago, "Roll Your Own Linkbait Tech Headline": http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2011/01/roll-your-own...

anthonyb4• 14 years ago

  30. A Legitimately Interesting Technical Blog Post

Should probably be marked 'unflag', too...

pja2• 14 years ago

Every online community needs a good flounce every now and again. Extra points for the 'I just wanted to see if you all loved me really' reverse flounce shortly afterwards!

bleakgadfly• 14 years ago

Also: "I made something awesome in a functional language"

RaSoJo2• 14 years ago

And it's missing a post pointing out things missing on another post about things missing out on another post about...umm...uhhh

duiker1012• 14 years ago

"HN is great but the design is terrible! So here is my innovative version(filled with just eye candies)"

"How I learn to program in 30 minutes and bootstrapped my first startup"

"Show HN: My new social network that will change the world", from the author of the previous article

Andrex• 14 years ago

Later that day: "That social network from earlier today has a gaping security hole (uses default Rails scaffolding)"

biot• 14 years ago

It also needs "Apologist piece on why copyright infringement is good (torrentfreak.com)" with "94 polarized comments".

startupfounder• 14 years ago

It also needs clever comments that tell the article what it is missing.

bpatrianakos• 14 years ago

Polarized comments? Usually it's all the apologists and me in there. I didn't know there was anyone else who wasn't an apologist for copyright infringement. Nice to meet you

smoyer• 14 years ago

Do you honestly need a shoebox and a bicycle?

DanielBMarkham4• 14 years ago

"How I finally ditched my shoebox and found the successful startup I always wanted"

vitorarins• 14 years ago

It's also missing "Summer LL(2013)"

JonnieCache2• 14 years ago

Don't forget "10% of a UNIX manpage typed out in hipster compatible phraseology and intimated like it's forbidden knowledge."

batgaijin• 14 years ago

more like 'hipster' knowledge.

they have fixed gear bikes, we have custom compiled FreeBSD kernels because we don't know what we are doing.

paulgb• 14 years ago

"Show HN: Bluestrap, a Twitter Bootstrap theme with more blue"

diminish• 14 years ago

"What I learned from Steve Jobs?"

"How iPad kills PCs"

"My iCruft and Me"

bluekite2000• 14 years ago

You are missing the "How I lived out of a shoebox and traveled the world on a bicycle while creating my startup that teaches people how to live out of a shoebox and traveled the world on a bicycle while..."

notdan• 14 years ago

I'm surprised nobody has included this:

Unknown or expired link. http://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=ZVizUZJ5Ar

holznot• 14 years ago

"How I managed to get VIM to work just like Eclipse. With dotfiles."

pron• 14 years ago

"A long personal essay with a moving anecdote on why surviving cancer is more important than building a startup"

"Why you should always validate your first $100M in sales with a mockup, before writing a single line of code"

"How we can implement Ayn Rand's ideas on success to solve world hunger with crowdsourced electronics"

"What is success, anyway?"

IheartApplesDix• 14 years ago

"Apple makes the only developer laptop"

pkorzeniewski2• 14 years ago

I laughed at "How I bootstrapped my company in 6 hours (with breaks)" :) I always wondered why this was a thing on HN, it doesn't matter if something took one weekend, one month or one year to finish - it's the result that matters, and saying "I build it in 24h" is the same as saying "it has a lot of bugs, but I want to launch it anyway".

omd• 14 years ago

Because that's not a company, it's a website. It takes 6 hours just to file all the paperwork to get a company started.

blablabla1232• 14 years ago

It's all about the timing ;)

wyclif2• 14 years ago

"Why C++ Is Not 'Back'."

12 hours later...

"Why C++ Is Back."

georgeorwell• 14 years ago

They should update the list so that when this gets posted for the third time in 2013, the top item is: "Great HN parody (2012) (linkedlistnyc.org)"

khet• 14 years ago

"How I remapped my capslock key to be both ESC and Ctrl"

That really got me thinking. Then I realized I was reading a parody. I am still thinking.

ovi256• 14 years ago

If computer keyboards were velocity sensitive like music keyboards, maybe you could do it through discriminating touch velocity (force). I imagine it could be tricky to get used to though! Idea, maybe key down duration could be used as proxy for velocity, as in, more forceful key press last less?

Jach• 14 years ago

I was thinking something simpler. Holding down caps lock produces the same effect as holding down either esc or ctrl, but after you release it the mode for the next time toggles to the other.

Lapsa• 14 years ago

someone has to make this happen. imagine - no need for shift/caps_lock keys - just BASH HARDER your fingers to get uppercase.

mhd• 14 years ago

The Emacs Wiki has an item about remapping the space bar to be both space when pressed alone and Ctrl when pressed with another key. With implementations for OS X, X11 and Windows. Might be suitable for adaption.

http://emacswiki.org/emacs/MovingTheCtrlKey#toc24

cfontes• 14 years ago

This should be pinned somewhere... it's just great :D

anthonyb4• 14 years ago

Just wait another two months, and it'll be around again ;)

phatbyte• 14 years ago

I love HN but this made me laugh :P, nailed it pretty much. I would just add "Why X sucks because now I'm learning a trendy hipster new Y that no one knows of"

TeMPOraL2• 14 years ago

My favourite HN piece ever: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/216352/guys_youre_not_helping.png

So, guys, should I or should I not learn to code? :D.

pkorzeniewski2• 14 years ago

The "don't" has more points so.. it's obvious, majority can't be wrong :)

anthonyb4• 14 years ago

Not a two-thirds majority though :)

sageikosa• 14 years ago

Votes of interest, not necessarily approval of the thesis. That's what's wrong with HN voting ;-)

neic• 14 years ago

Even if the votes was approval of the thesis it would not necessarily make it the right thing to do. :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum

InclinedPlane2• 14 years ago

Both have excellent points, read them and then make up your own mind.

TeMPOraL2• 14 years ago

Unfortunately it's too late for me - I decided years ago (in favour of learning). However you're right, both articles (and associated discussions) had excellent points and were well worth reading.

mtgx• 14 years ago

I thought the funniest was "Why Go can't scale past 2 billion users".

jamesmiller52• 14 years ago

I love that it was submitted by "nodejs4eva"

Peroni• 14 years ago

Would have liked to have seen "Recruiters suck. AMIRITE?"

atourgates• 14 years ago

Don't forget, "Why all MBAs should be forcibly relocated to a deserted island with no food or water."

indiecore2• 14 years ago

but what's wrong with that one?

robryan• 14 years ago

"I learnt Haskell and just had to write about it"

"Surely I can spin this Tweet into an article"

"Why latest Apple product is the best thing you have ever seen" - Marco, Gruber or MG

markprovan• 14 years ago

Nothing about Ruby and scaling? :O

anthonyb4• 14 years ago

Everyone knows Ruby doesn't scale! ;)

raverbashing2• 14 years ago

Yeah, but apparently you can use Go for the backend and scale up to 2 Billion users

(And someone will use this fact as a reason to not use Go. Of course their website will melt after a couple of minutes on the front page of HN because they forgot to do any basic load testing on their servers and didn't catch something very simple)

praptak• 14 years ago

They included "A Legitimately Interesting Technical Blog Post", that's pretty generous :)

wladimir• 14 years ago

Yes, at the bottom slot, with only 3 votes :-)

RaSoJo2• 14 years ago

and 0 comments

k3n• 14 years ago

Combined with the 3 votes & 0 comments, this was the one that got me to guffaw.

blablabla1232• 14 years ago

"How I bootstrapped my company in 6 hours (with breaks)" :D

irahul6• 14 years ago

Some of them have been thought out - "how I mapped caps lock" by yakshaver, "derailed by a pedantic comment" by wellactually(I suffer from this; working on it), "apple's downfall" by armchairceo; the comment puns(stylish, worn-out, nebolous) are pretty meh.

Despite this being a parody, I would still like to point out "a labor of love you can say mean things about". I have seen it happen here way too often. Someone posts something and the crowd goes wild - "this is a feature not a product", "as a designer I can tell you you suck", "another cool aid drinkers pretending node.js is cool" etc. Someone posts a "Show HN" doesn't mean you get the right to walk all over it. And the worse part is, you pretend you were doing him a favor - "I was only giving feedback which the poster asked for". The poster asked for feedback, not for insults. It doesn't matter if you are a programming god(most of the people doing it aren't, but still) - there is a difference between feedback and "look at this pathetic shit thinking he is worth anything".

I am sure I am not the only one who thinks people go overboard with their so-called feedback. pg especially made a post about the flood of launches coming in and being nice to them.

Please be nice to them. For you their launch may be "yet another YC startup," but for each individual startup this is their big moment.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2862067

brudgers• 14 years ago

I've noticed a drop in meanness since it was brought to the attention of the community. It still happens, but many people appear to be making a conscious effort to avoid it in their comments and combat it editorially in the comments of others.

johnyzee2• 14 years ago

Some comments are mean because the poster is a jerk. But some of the most valuable comments you will get are angry diatribes from people who probably saw potential in your idea but were disappointed for some reason. These are well worth tuning into. The worst type of comment is the one that wasn't made because no one gave a damn one way or the other.

irahul6• 14 years ago

> These are well worth tuning into.

If I do a "Show HN", I will read each and every comment and think about it. But that's not the point of contention here. The point is you can be honest, unfiltered, upset and can still not be an asshole.

aw3c2• 14 years ago

> Someone posts a "Show HN" doesn't mean you get the right to walk all over it.

the right definitely exists and should be cherished. I agree that being nice is a nice goal but I also love unfiltered honest feedback like you can easily get from this community.

jamesmiller52• 14 years ago

Honesty and respect are not mutually exclusive.

You can give great, thoughtful feedback that accurately describes your feelings without being unprofessional or disrespectful.

irahul6• 14 years ago

> the right definitely exists

What right? If you are talking about free speech, that isn't applicable here. Owners of site can allow or disallow expressions on their discretion.

When I said right, I meant the typical defense - "They posted it here. They asked for it.". I am saying just because someone posts a "Show HN" doesn't imply you can be a jerk and hide behind "but they wanted feedback".

> unfiltered honest

The problem with "unfiltered and honest" is it doesn't have a agreed-on definition.

You must be blind to not notice the crime against humanity that "white on yellow" text is.

The white on yellow text is unreadable.

To some people, 1 might look honest and unfiltered; to me it looks like some asshole trying to be tough guy on the web.

2 isn't filtering anything and is honest. "Not being an asshole" and "being honest and straight forward" aren't mutually exclusive.

npsimons• 14 years ago

The thing of it is, I'm of two minds on this: yes, it seems that HN (and the Internet in general) can be overly harsh, especially considering that many of the harshest critics will probably never do anything substantialy close to a lot of what gets submitted. OTOH, it's sort of like boot camp: if someone can't handle mean things said about their idea, then they probably won't survive the slings and arrows of the market (and yes, I know not all of the "Show HNs" are business related). Also, many people, when they see something that seems obvious, already done, or simply wrong, tend to have a bad reaction (see http://xkcd.com/386/). Still, criticisms could be phrased better; OTOH again, but many of the originators of "Show HNs" that seemed like the most likely to suceed were the ones who show up, acknowledge valid criticism, and fix faults with their projects. Some of the best even thank polite critics for input.

freshhawk2• 14 years ago

> Someone posts a "Show HN" doesn't mean you get the right to walk all over it

I didn't realize that signing up to HN entitled me to negativity free advertising for my pet project.

Wouldn't you expect people posting Show HN posts to know what happens in the comment threads of all of them?

I agree that the community should try to discourage plain insults, but I want to see well reasoned thoughts and critiques of other projects from the community. If that critique is harsh then it's harsh. Welcome to going public with your idea. I agree with you about the insults, but you are also drifting towards encouraging protecting egos that are tied to their product. That's not a helpful community norm. Be supportive of people working hard and ruthlessly honest about their ideas and products.

Also, we're coming up on a decade of digg/reddit/HN style social news sites. Is it time to stop being surprised that the behaviour that this medium incentivises is the behaviour we keep seeing?

irahul6• 14 years ago

> Wouldn't you expect people posting Show HN posts to know what happens in the comment threads of all of them?

It happens all the time and posters are well aware of the behavior. Neither of these mean it's desirable to put down everyone who does a "Show HN". If anything, it happens all the time is the reason behind the concern.

> I want to see well reasoned thoughts and critiques of other projects from the community.

> Be supportive of people working hard and ruthlessly honest about their ideas and products.

I am not advocating heaps of praise for anyone who does a "Show HN". Honesty and not being an asshole aren't mutually exclusive.

> Is it time to stop being surprised that the behaviour that this medium incentivises is the behaviour we keep seeing?

I am not too sure if HN incentivises being a jerk to "Show HN" or posts in general. But if it does, it should stop. Just because it happens doesn't make it desirable.

andrewcooke• 14 years ago

Comment on some small technical detail that I think is interesting, but that no-one else cares about.

dschiptsov2• 14 years ago

Sudden realization that HN or Zerohedge or /r/programming/ are just a mass-media?)) This is a premature enlightenment.)

The next level is a realization that it isn't any different form /b/ - just a flow of a community-generated content about some buzzwords.))

Well, we must admit that a distribution of our interests is a little bit broader, but it is a substitution-based activity nevertheless.)

toyg• 14 years ago

I know HN is full of LISP hackers, but there's no need to add random closing brackets, surely?

dschiptsov2• 14 years ago

Thanks!

xentronium• 14 years ago

For some reason, using closing parens instead of proper smileys with colons caught on in Russia and some Eastern Europe countries (never seen one from anyone living in Western Europe).

Not to offend dschiptsov, but (ab)using them is an awful habit to have.

wiradikusuma• 14 years ago

...and somebody would complain why this thing is in the front page, and other person questioning why HN becoming like Reddit, and someone will downvote the comment.

..but then some other guy would defend it by saying "but it is hacker-y, etc"

jacques_chester• 14 years ago

It's this sort of thing that originally drove me away from /r/programming and which I continue to find hilarious about HN (and to found a parodic subreddit, see if you can find it).

EddieB• 14 years ago

Can't look at the listing in the same way after seeing that haha

Joeboy• 14 years ago

It's probably best to wear alternate pairs of shoes, so that they get a chance to dry out and air between outings.

ck2• 14 years ago

I was a little disappointed some of them didn't link to actual articles.

dizzystar• 14 years ago

You forgot to add woman-centric posts, like "How I hacked my daughter's brain into learning Python," or "How I taught 3 girls between the ages of 13 and 55 to love Linux command line."

But this is pretty funny. No MS hate?

kintamanimatt• 14 years ago

The MS hate comes in waves, just like everything else on HN! This is why HN can become especially addictive to me when the topic du jour appeals to my interests.

I guess I should write a blog about this, but first I need to get a blog. Perhaps I could blog about getting a blog so I can blog an analysis of how HN's topics are both cyclical and wave-like. Both, of course posted to HN at optimal hours for maximum effect!

timinman• 14 years ago

Great articles. Please add: "How Jokes and Parodies are turning HN into Reddit" :)

retube• 14 years ago

At least 5 entries should have been new .js libraries. Also no github posts.

nchuhoai• 14 years ago

Favorite: Vivek on immigration policies

rossta• 14 years ago

Best HN post ever.

dinkumthinkum• 14 years ago

It's missing a post like: "Tech Founder that Graduated from Stanford Says College Dead, Long Live Blog Learning"

ampersandy• 14 years ago

This was posted 60 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4621731.

It also turns up as the first hit for "hacker news parody" or "hn parody" on Google.

greghinch• 14 years ago

Oh dear, I actually said #28 when we started ours...

jackalope• 14 years ago

Brilliant, though it seemed to me to have one glaring omission:

    I'm Quitting [Popular Nonessential Service] for 1 Month

followed by:

    What I Learned from Quitting [Popular Nonessential Service] for 1 Month

scottmagdalein• 14 years ago

#22

eurodance• 14 years ago

"I got rejected from YC and here's my idea. It still sucks"

krmmalik• 14 years ago

Haha. This is too funny. I love the twitter post that just happens to have 140 comments!

mixedbit• 14 years ago

Linked List voting system is broken.

JonSkeptic• 14 years ago

1 snarky comment

tokenadult• 14 years ago

AFTER EDIT: This a duplicate submission, a repost of the previously submitted

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4621731

item from a different URL

http://us2.campaign-archive1.com/?u=193b767bbb3b0eb0d949d592...

two months ago. (That is shown by the date on both submitted mock front pages of HN, and by their identical text.) It's funny, and memorable enough that I still recall the last time this was posted.

BCM43• 14 years ago

Yes?

jcurbo• 14 years ago

Needs more Bitcoin stories.

polshaw• 14 years ago

How i WISH we could rid ourselves of the 'Contrarian blog post to recently popular blog post' cancer. It's a phenomenon i can't say i even see anywhere else online.

rachelbythebay• 14 years ago

So, you've seen the hand-curated fake HN. Now see the randomly-generated fake HN I did for a laugh a couple of months ago.

http://rachelbythebay.com/fun/hrand/

Some of the examples look curiously close to actual news, but they're all random. Really.

_sentient• 14 years ago

"I bootstrapped my bitcoins while married".

That's just gold.

neumann_alfred• 14 years ago

"Facebook buys marriage in space", "Tim Cook wants jQuery on the freeway"... I cannot stop laughing!

Sorry HN, but I think I'm addicted to that other site now. goes there and keeps hitting f5

zem2• 14 years ago

beautifully done :) "Ten Ways to use SDK on Windows" was pure gold.

bjhoops1• 14 years ago

131 self-referential comments

athgeo• 14 years ago

"My 5000 word assessment of (insert latest gadget here) that leaves no doubt about why absolutely (no-one|everyone) should buy this, conveniently ignoring that other geeks have their own opinion and the average user doesn't give a damn"

"10 mistakes that I made during my unsuccessful YC interview, 9 of which PG probably didn't even notice"

"Show HN: My first (read: I'm younger than you) app I hacked up in less than 20 mins (read: I'm smarter than you), because I had nothing else to do (read: don't feel too cozy in your job, cuz I'm dropping out of college any day [if my parents agree, that is])"

"How I made big bucks with something so trivial that I'm surprised my cleaning lady did not think of it before me"

"Apple is no longer as innovative as they were 5 minutes ago"

Plenty of discussions that mix a lot of fancy Latin expressions and Scotsmen

Recruiter: a derogatory term for somebody that knows less about a specific field than than the experts in that field they hire

Fanboy: favoriteGadget.brand != other.favoriteGadget.brand

Fanboy of a Recruiter: greatest insult on HN

deveac• 14 years ago

No.22

That's the one that got me. Now pardon me while I write a post about duplicating comic timing graphically, as a constraint.

noonespecial• 14 years ago

There should be one on there talking about not talking about karma. I think I saw a "how I got so much karma on HN" story peak at #4 earlier this week.

return0• 14 years ago

Congratulations on your neat website. I think you really should consider making you're page center aligned - i hurt my head looking left in my bigass screen. I am very much a fan of wearing the same shoe every 3 days, but i admit youre article about sexism has changed my life. Unfortunately, since you don't support openID, i refuse to join your site.

To complete the picture, i would really like to respond here with a very long-form comment of at least 8 paragraphs, in which i address one by one a number of points that irritated me in a boastful way that makes my arguments sound authoritative and deep, while in reality it's just my brain-fart of the moment. I should also add a couple of references in square brackets, because that's what scientists do[1] and people seem to believe scientists (what's more, the most respected scientific journals use the vancouver reference style, which makes me look even more knowledgable). Because of the outrageousness of my long-form comment (and because it takes up a large portion of the screen real estate), people will upvote me and respond with equally half-cooked comments , some of them applying Godwin's law, and others merely acknowledging this application of the law.

Unfortunately, i barely made it to 3 paragraphs and i 've more or less run out of stupid things to say.

Looking forward to the new version of your website that will be implemented in a single var javascript statement, because that's my favorite programming paradigm this afternoon.

[1] they really do

zem2• 14 years ago

I loved the genuinely parodic headlines ("How I remapped my caps lock key to be both ESC and Ctrl" was my favourite), but the metaheadlines like "A long rant about a YC company falling short in some regard" are simply done to death and IMO have not been funny in years.

orthecreedence• 14 years ago

You forgot the unlimited "Why I...and you should too" headlines.

jliptzin• 14 years ago

It's missing "How I solved the travelling salesman problem using pure CSS and Clojure on my coffee break"

Semiapies• 14 years ago

"RMS hates something."

"Woz disagrees with something Apple does."

"Why this wildly successful and profitable company is doomed. Someday."

"Commonly-used technology is obsolete."

"You are not cool enough to succeed, especially if you are in any way successful. Please develop impostor syndrome."

chris1232• 14 years ago

How about a brogrammer or brogrammer-backlash story? Or an "I hate MBAs" one?

Great HN parody

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