I've heard people refer to OSS devs as "a random guy in Alaska" before, altough that joke is probably older than the comic.

This is how I feel about the public NTP pool on which so many IoT devices depend.

Possibly because it's newer and had less time to pick up citations.

(author of the blog post) I would have loved to take into account each comic's age and compute some kind of normalization/weight but never got around to doing that. It's hard to do this kind of normalization correctly since HN's population size isn't a constant over time.