I stumbled across this site from one of those "/g/ acts like HN" threads a few months ago and it's quite funny. I think my favorite summaries so far are:
The Muskonauts figured out why their shit exploded. Hackernews, literally all of whom are actual rocket scientists, wonders if unit tests could have helped.
Russia addresses their worst nuclear contamination problem by putting a shed on it. Hackernews trades photos of the devastation and bitches about people getting paid money to work on the shed.
An astronaut has passed away. He retired from NASA in 1976, since which time humanity has been phoning it in with this whole space-travel scene. Half of Hackernews recognizes this as the massive failure it is; the other half seizes the opportunity to virtue-signal about all the other problems nobody's fixing.
>A blogspammer posts an amazing finding: immigrants hang out with other immigrants. Hackernews is frantic to post about how uninterested they are in stupid things like sports and music, and how that lack of interest hasn't stopped them from making friends with other hipsters.
"Some people Instagram their food. On Hackernews, foodie cred is earned by bragging about what you don't eat. Sugar. Bread. Dairy. Meat. Caffeine. All of these are linked by science to early stroke, heart attack, cancer, and/or obesity. In addition, to live a long healthy life you need to tend to the bacteria living in your intestine like a Sea Monkey colony -- and don't forget to meditate frequently. I bet you can figure out where all this is headed -- and yes, when a very scientific study was published indicating eating nothing at all gave you regenerative superpowers, the Hackernews dietary virtue-signalers lost their collective mind."
I rarely post. Have been laughing nonstop for the past 10 minutes.
Right on point:
Hackernews resumes a previous thread, wherein they admonish each other never to 'roll your own crypto', but rolling your own public-facing internet service, database backend, programming language, kernel, messaging protocol, orbital launcher, autonomous war robot, or legal document is completely fine.
This is fantastic. To the author: Don't stop summarizing these because this will be my new source of Hacker News posts and if you stop, I'll be living in a vacuum.
DDOS From IoT Cameras ... Hackernews is a very experienced IT professional and has predicted this. They hold up Google products as models to follow. It is not clear why. Hackernews believes Cloudflare will solve all their problems. Cloudflare agrees this is likely, please click here to apply for a job figuring out how.
...
Google Analytics silently notes which citizens have been contaminated with toxins inimical to surveillance capitalism.
...
A user is unironically directed to Reddit for reliable information about illicit pharmaceuticals.
...
Upgrade Your SSH Keys ... Nobody has useful input, but a least one user is coherent enough to win Crypto Buzzward Bingo. Nobody upgrades their SSH keys.
...
a Hackernews with 'hacker' in his username admits defeat before the inconquerable task of installing three packages.
Oh, God. I'm pretty much dying here from reading this. Some of it feels too true, but the best is just too witty not to laugh at.
I'm not sure if it's intentional, but it's raising questions once again in me about how useful the comments in aggregator sites like this end up being. Comments are almost always made by the 10% of people whose barrier to commenting is the lowest and judged and voted on by just the average hackernews reader. Assuming knowledgeable comments even happen, what gets upvoted is what seems reasonable or just pleasing to the average hackernews reader, not what is actually representative of the best available knowledge.
And, as hackernews gets bigger and bigger, the average user becomes more and more like the average internet user in general and the contributions become more and more like if you just talked to a group average person, not experts. If I wanted that kind of knowledge I'd just go talk to people in my daily life, listen to some rumors, etc.
I often suspect that hackernews exists partly because of the idea that conversations and comment sections like this are going to happen anyways and spew ill-formed opinions regardless and ycombinator figured they should at least have a finger in the place where they happen if nothing else.
I'm still breathing a sigh of relief that it's no longer the Haskell Evangelism Strikeforce. People can preach Rust all they like, but Haskell scared me.
I was a bit surprised that Go didn't receive equal treatment. Then I noticed that this page is brought to us by some Plan 9 fanboy site generator and wisdom was bestowed unto me.
Humour is generally downvoted on HN, because us programmers (mostly) take things too literally. But, seriously, tech really is the biggest laugh because we take each generation of software, language, platforms so seriously, completely ignoring the fact that we are just glorified typists trying to find patterns where none might exist even without having the necessary background to do so.
> Humour is generally downvoted on HN, because us programmers (mostly) take things too literally.
No, humor is generally downvoted on HN because most of it is lazy, and no one wants HN to turn into another Reddit. Lazy humor is a Reddit staple, and there's already far too much Reddit around as it is. Good humor tends to fare reasonably well, and considerable allowance is made for attempts which fail to be funny but still show effort - otherwise, I doubt I'd get away with doggerel in rhyming couplets [1] and similar such excesses.
This would have been a much better submission if it were hosted on my experimental port of Wordpress written in Rust, instead of legacy html on Werk...
I find it strangely pleasant that one of my comments was (apparently) called out in a summary, for it means that I have truly been absorbed into the HN hivemind.
An internet posts a resume-building exercise with no practical value or interesting results or useful methodology. Hackernews debates the relative merits of software designed to execute bad programs as quickly as possible. The Rust Evangelism Strikeforce makes a tactical decision not to get involved, since people are talking about fast code.
In accordance with federal law, I must dutifully inform the author that there are at least five Mozilla employees working on Rust, thank-you-very-much.
Well, that one didn't get enough votes to become a top story. Not that the NSA isn't above using the backdoor they probably have installed on HN to reverse enough upvotes to keep it from getting so big that people noticed it and began intentionally altering their behavior patterns to skew the dossiers the NSA is building.
It's actually great sense of humor, but too cynical and dismissal of other people effort. There's nothing wrong with pointing out occasional HN hive-mind tendencies, but his summaries of FOSDEM talks paint a different picture. He seems to get real kicks of belittling people's years of work.
[+] [-] Inconel|9 years ago|reply
The Muskonauts figured out why their shit exploded. Hackernews, literally all of whom are actual rocket scientists, wonders if unit tests could have helped.
Russia addresses their worst nuclear contamination problem by putting a shed on it. Hackernews trades photos of the devastation and bitches about people getting paid money to work on the shed.
An astronaut has passed away. He retired from NASA in 1976, since which time humanity has been phoning it in with this whole space-travel scene. Half of Hackernews recognizes this as the massive failure it is; the other half seizes the opportunity to virtue-signal about all the other problems nobody's fixing.
[+] [-] windlessstorm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WillyOnWheels|9 years ago|reply
Ukraine would like a word with you.
[+] [-] vacri|9 years ago|reply
This is patently false. Some of us are actual brain surgeons!
[+] [-] bitwize|9 years ago|reply
"Some people Instagram their food. On Hackernews, foodie cred is earned by bragging about what you don't eat. Sugar. Bread. Dairy. Meat. Caffeine. All of these are linked by science to early stroke, heart attack, cancer, and/or obesity. In addition, to live a long healthy life you need to tend to the bacteria living in your intestine like a Sea Monkey colony -- and don't forget to meditate frequently. I bet you can figure out where all this is headed -- and yes, when a very scientific study was published indicating eating nothing at all gave you regenerative superpowers, the Hackernews dietary virtue-signalers lost their collective mind."
[+] [-] perishabledave|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] periram|9 years ago|reply
Right on point: Hackernews resumes a previous thread, wherein they admonish each other never to 'roll your own crypto', but rolling your own public-facing internet service, database backend, programming language, kernel, messaging protocol, orbital launcher, autonomous war robot, or legal document is completely fine.
[+] [-] MrBuddyCasino|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vortico|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Steko|9 years ago|reply
...
Google Analytics silently notes which citizens have been contaminated with toxins inimical to surveillance capitalism.
...
A user is unironically directed to Reddit for reliable information about illicit pharmaceuticals.
...
Upgrade Your SSH Keys ... Nobody has useful input, but a least one user is coherent enough to win Crypto Buzzward Bingo. Nobody upgrades their SSH keys.
...
a Hackernews with 'hacker' in his username admits defeat before the inconquerable task of installing three packages.
[+] [-] hodgesrm|9 years ago|reply
Eclipse git checkins stopped working immediately after going to a 4K RSA key size. I should have seen it coming.
[+] [-] justaguyonline|9 years ago|reply
I'm not sure if it's intentional, but it's raising questions once again in me about how useful the comments in aggregator sites like this end up being. Comments are almost always made by the 10% of people whose barrier to commenting is the lowest and judged and voted on by just the average hackernews reader. Assuming knowledgeable comments even happen, what gets upvoted is what seems reasonable or just pleasing to the average hackernews reader, not what is actually representative of the best available knowledge.
And, as hackernews gets bigger and bigger, the average user becomes more and more like the average internet user in general and the contributions become more and more like if you just talked to a group average person, not experts. If I wanted that kind of knowledge I'd just go talk to people in my daily life, listen to some rumors, etc.
I often suspect that hackernews exists partly because of the idea that conversations and comment sections like this are going to happen anyways and spew ill-formed opinions regardless and ycombinator figured they should at least have a finger in the place where they happen if nothing else.
[+] [-] hkmurakami|9 years ago|reply
"The Rust Evangelism Strikeforce" is particularly brilliant.
[+] [-] clock_tower|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mhd|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thunderbong|9 years ago|reply
Humour is generally downvoted on HN, because us programmers (mostly) take things too literally. But, seriously, tech really is the biggest laugh because we take each generation of software, language, platforms so seriously, completely ignoring the fact that we are just glorified typists trying to find patterns where none might exist even without having the necessary background to do so.
[+] [-] throwanem|9 years ago|reply
No, humor is generally downvoted on HN because most of it is lazy, and no one wants HN to turn into another Reddit. Lazy humor is a Reddit staple, and there's already far too much Reddit around as it is. Good humor tends to fare reasonably well, and considerable allowance is made for attempts which fail to be funny but still show effort - otherwise, I doubt I'd get away with doggerel in rhyming couplets [1] and similar such excesses.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13546379
[+] [-] bigiain|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kibwen|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sverige|9 years ago|reply
I guess it's finally time for me to learn Rust.
[+] [-] jacobush|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tyingq|9 years ago|reply
"the Rust Evangelism Strikeforce stages a sortie, but meets resistance."
[+] [-] K0SM0S|9 years ago|reply
> 1.1B Taxi Rides on Kdb+/q and 4 Xeon Phi CPUs
An internet posts a resume-building exercise with no practical value or interesting results or useful methodology. Hackernews debates the relative merits of software designed to execute bad programs as quickly as possible. The Rust Evangelism Strikeforce makes a tactical decision not to get involved, since people are talking about fast code.
[+] [-] kibwen|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] partycoder|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] i336_|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WillyOnWheels|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sverige|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ivm|9 years ago|reply
I wish some day there will be AI-generated summaries like these for news and stories.
[+] [-] johncolanduoni|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simplehuman|9 years ago|reply
It would be so meta if you summarized this post.
[+] [-] anonred|9 years ago|reply
http://n-gate.com/hackernews/index.atom
[+] [-] janklimo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bzbarsky|9 years ago|reply
The page has both RSS and Atom feeds. View source is your friend.
[+] [-] chrismealy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yellowapple|9 years ago|reply
Every time some article has a headline in the format "$company wants to $verb_phrase", Paul Graham huffs a kitten.
[+] [-] Vivtek|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clock_tower|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hyperpallium|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] veli_joza|9 years ago|reply