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Worthwhile reading on Easter Eggs

"Why No Easter Eggs"

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/larryosterman...

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Why%20no%20Easter%20Eggs

... and

https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/405874

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27994194

Does anyone know if Hacker News comments are being used as training data? I wonder this about Gmail, Skype, Voice Conversations on Xbox Live, etc. Mostly too afraid to ask because it sounds like paranoia.

Even more sad when a Tech journal doesn't have an RSS feed, but posts to Facebook and Twitter instead. For example https://www.thenewatlantis.com/

I still miss Yahoo Pipes.

Some of these don't show up for me (like Saturn). This might work better with a web-font? Although then you'd lose the harmonious platform emojis. I wonder if there's a way to check if a unicode character exists in a font and dynamically substitute, without using canvas.

Drag-along rights, with a waiver of appraisal rights?

On the question of "is it hated", Stackoverflow publishes a survey every year on interesting questions like this. It doesn't get a lot of attention here for whatever reason.

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#most-loved-dr...

My guess is because:

- lots of people don't like Javascript

- lots of people don't like V8

- the guy who made Node.js (Ryan Dahl) doesn't like it either

- programmers think anything without thread support is a toy

I like Node.js, Javascript, and Ryan Dahl, and have no strong opinions on V8.

That one day that new api or programming language you're just learning will be considered not only obsolete but dangerous.

This seems very likely extrapolating from current trends.

There's S.M.A.R.T. and a lot of freeware that can read it and tell you how much has been written to the disk. If only it were built into operating systems, with a graph, then you could set up warnings, like you can for overheating CPUs, etc.

The irony of a topic like this is that the algorithm will put the least contrarian opinions on top.

Right now the most conventional/pedestrian opinion you could possibly imagine is listed first.

If you leave off the "to light years" conversion, you'll see that the units don't match up. A light year is a measure of distance (m). The result of this equation is 3.86×10^99 s^4/(kg^2 * m^3). How or why Wolfram decided to convert that into 13.82 billion light years is anybody's guess, but it's definitely wrong and nonsensical. You can't convert a s^4/(kg^2 * m^3) unit into just an m without more.

A contrarian might ask "How many bugs were there in the HTML5 APIs that replaced it?" Probably fewer considering HTML5 is an open/modern code base? Some high profile ones in Audio though...

Eventually, a grumpy old man* will show up and mention teletype and time-sharing. Someone else will incorrect him saying cloud computing is different. I'd love to hear Peter Norvig and Bill Gates talk it over.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6Ztdp70peU&t=115s

There is also the related "Matthew effect"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect#Sociology_of_sc...

Breakrooms also have a dark side:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peryton_(astronomy)

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/05/microwave-ov...

Also available at:

http://larrysummers.com/2018/10/09/36229/

https://web.archive.org/web/20210820121158/https://www.ft.co...

They should include C-SPAN coverage.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?165916-101

https://www.c-span.org/video/?165959-2

The second link is a particularly disheartening time capsule of political discourse that morning.

This article is about NFTs.

Here is the Wikipedia Article about this topic:

Project Horizon was a 1959 study to determine the feasibility of constructing a scientific / military base on the Moon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Horizon

There is also the Emmy Nominated HBO Documentary "Hacking Democracy", from 2006.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Democracy

Apparently surgeons can do something similar. The experienced surgeon you talked to is just there you get to you agree to surgery, without explicitly telling you a first year (poorly/un)supervised resident will do all the cutting.

Often you'd see HN posts near the top, with few votes or comments. Although Rust sounds amazing, it has a Submarine* feel to it. Would the project be on the front page if the title didn't mention Rust?

I think Haskell had this problem years ago as well: it was like any obscure algorithm you'd lookup on Wikipedia had sample code ... in Haskell only.

* http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

2600 word lead-up to "Tarzan"|(Tarzan)

This style of writing is just obnoxious.

"We want to hire people like you to go and interview at other companies."

"During the interview, you'll evangelise our clients' products."

Hopefully someday this will have a companion site, like https://www.explainxkcd.com/

Shockingly, it also has an effect on the brain microbiota of owners:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3963851/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasma_gondii