I'm racking my brains and Google and can't seem to pull up which Monty Python sketch or movie that one comes from. Give a hint?

Edit: Oh. Found it. In "Meaning of Life", uttered shortly after this musical number. NSFW and liable to cause religious / political flamewars, but it makes the point, so here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzVHjg3AqIQ . You can skip to 6:09 for the line.

I'm impressed that you found that, given that my memory of the quote is inaccurate. I prefer my memory (don't we all).

Wasn't the "cheap ploy" tried long ago with a week of Erlang? It probably didn't work as intended then either, but I'm curious if it's just the scale of HN that has changed, or if it's something else, that makes such an experiment seem even more out of the question now.

It worked better than intended! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512280.

I don't think the two cases are comparable really. One was a uniting move while the other turned out to be a dividing move, though we didn't mean it that way. I bet if we appealed to HN to band together against some Redditesque adversary today, it would work just as well as it did back then.

For those who are also curious¹, and the excellent linked topic².

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-03-11

² https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512291