I checked the HN guidelines, and I didn't see anything about humor. I did find this, though:

> Please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

> I know this comment is in jest, but please don't joke on Hacker News as you would on Reddit. Posts like this add little informational content, spawn a thread of joke responses, and take time away from hundreds of people who are here to read high signal commentary.

Here's a challenge:

Create a bot capable of generating and posting content like the above that's attributed to "zxcvbn4038."

The bot doesn't have to be able to get through spam filters or register itself. It just has to take the current state of a forum thread as (part of its) input and output a) content for a post and b) a position in the tree to insert it.

The human bot-author can then try to insert the content into the thread at the given position. If the post doesn't get detected as spam and can avoid downvotes, the bot wins.

The prize is the sheer joy of contradicting what I'm assuming is an HN mod:

> edit: I'm being downvoted, but consider the comment chain this has generated.

Edit: added rule about avoiding downvotes to retain "high signal commentary."

And it looks like we may already be there:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/14/elon-musk...

Yet some more signal for this thread that started with a joke.

The occasional exception is reasonable, if the exception is exceptionally clever.

At the risk of getting downvoted too, I'll second this. Reddit is already a great platform to read fun comments on any possible subject, let's try to keep them differentiated.

Humour is fine here so long as it makes the audience think. Which the comment did.

If mainstream systems suggest that a human is acting like a robot, then what is a robot and what is human? That's pretty profound.

It seems that we're nearing the point that anyone who thinks and acts rationally and contrary to consumptive norms is indistinguishable on a coarse scale from a logical machine.

I mean, even Reddit feels less and less like Reddit nowadays...