
Great HN parody - dorkitude
http://www.linkedlistnyc.org/archive/issue_081.html
======
DanielBMarkham
It's missing the "Why I'm leaving HN (This time for good)"

and "A front page HN story about how being on the front page of HN changed my
business"

and "A rambling article about how voting is broken on HN"

and "How I lived out of a shoebox and traveled the world on a bicycle while
creating my startup"

Anybody interested in more, I refer you to my javascript parody of two years
ago, "Roll Your Own Linkbait Tech Headline":
[http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2011/01/roll-your-
own...](http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2011/01/roll-your-own-l.php)

~~~
biot
It also needs "Apologist piece on why copyright infringement is good
(torrentfreak.com)" with "94 polarized comments".

~~~
bpatrianakos
Polarized comments? Usually it's all the apologists and me in there. I didn't
know there was anyone else who wasn't an apologist for copyright infringement.
Nice to meet you

------
irahul
Some of them have been thought out - "how I mapped caps lock" by yakshaver,
"derailed by a pedantic comment" by wellactually(I suffer from this; working
on it), "apple's downfall" by armchairceo; the comment puns(stylish, worn-out,
nebolous) are pretty meh.

Despite this being a parody, I would still like to point out "a labor of love
you can say mean things about". I have seen it happen here way too often.
Someone posts something and the crowd goes wild - "this is a feature not a
product", "as a designer I can tell you you suck", "another cool aid drinkers
pretending node.js is cool" etc. Someone posts a "Show HN" doesn't mean you
get the right to walk all over it. And the worse part is, you pretend you were
doing him a favor - "I was only giving feedback which the poster asked for".
The poster asked for feedback, not for insults. It doesn't matter if you are a
programming god(most of the people doing it aren't, but still) - there is a
difference between feedback and "look at this pathetic shit thinking he is
worth anything".

I am sure I am not the only one who thinks people go overboard with their so-
called feedback. pg especially made a post about the flood of launches coming
in and being nice to them.

 _Please be nice to them. For you their launch may be "yet another YC
startup," but for each individual startup this is their big moment._

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2862067>

~~~
aw3c2
> Someone posts a "Show HN" doesn't mean you get the right to walk all over
> it.

the _right_ definitely exists and should be cherished. I agree that being nice
is a nice goal but I also love unfiltered honest feedback like you can easily
get from this community.

~~~
jamesmiller5
Honesty and respect are not mutually exclusive.

You can give great, thoughtful feedback that accurately describes your
feelings without being unprofessional or disrespectful.

~~~
mpyne
Sure, and people should.

But saying that people don't have the right to do otherwise is a much stronger
statement than what you just stated. In fact, people in general have the
_right_ to do many things which are immoral or even unethical, e.g. the
Westboro Baptist protests at funerals.

~~~
irahul
> But saying that people don't have the right to do otherwise

I should have worded it differently - I didn't mean _right_ as in legal
definition of rights(which isn't applicable here anyway) Let's just rephrase
it as someone asking for feedback doesn't mean you can walk over it.

As for what rights people have, HN is private property and what speech is
acceptable and what is not is totally up to the owners.

------
TeMPOraL
My favourite HN piece ever:
<https://dl.dropbox.com/u/216352/guys_youre_not_helping.png>

So, guys, should I or should I not learn to code? :D.

~~~
pkorzeniewski
The "don't" has more points so.. it's obvious, majority can't be wrong :)

~~~
neic
Even if the votes was approval of the thesis it would not necessarily make it
the right thing to do. :) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum>

------
tokenadult
AFTER EDIT: This a duplicate submission, a repost of the previously submitted

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4621731>

item from a different URL

[http://us2.campaign-
archive1.com/?u=193b767bbb3b0eb0d949d592...](http://us2.campaign-
archive1.com/?u=193b767bbb3b0eb0d949d5924&id=0c3a567f95&e=5603c292b3)

two months ago. (That is shown by the date on both submitted mock front pages
of HN, and by their identical text.) It's funny, and memorable enough that I
still recall the last time this was posted.

~~~
BCM43
Yes?

------
davedx
My favourite: "How I remapped my capslock key to be both ESC and Ctrl" --
maybe should have had VI in there too ;)

If a community can't laugh at itself, then it's surely doomed :D

~~~
jgrahamc
I agree. It's important to be able to laugh at ourselves. One of the dangers
of the startup world is people taking things _way too seriously_.

I think that's why my 'double stealth' parody was such a hit a while back:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4166183>

~~~
DanielBMarkham
"double stealth mode" is a classic. Very funny. I'm stealing that one.

------
rachelbythebay
So, you've seen the hand-curated fake HN. Now see the randomly-generated fake
HN I did for a laugh a couple of months ago.

<http://rachelbythebay.com/fun/hrand/>

Some of the examples look curiously close to actual news, but they're all
random. Really.

~~~
_sentient
"I bootstrapped my bitcoins while married".

That's just gold.

~~~
neumann_alfred
"Facebook buys marriage in space", "Tim Cook wants jQuery on the freeway"... I
cannot stop laughing!

Sorry HN, but I think I'm addicted to that other site now. _goes there and
keeps hitting f5_

------
jackalope
Brilliant, though it seemed to me to have one glaring omission:

    
    
        I'm Quitting [Popular Nonessential Service] for 1 Month
    

followed by:

    
    
        What I Learned from Quitting [Popular Nonessential Service] for 1 Month

------
derwildemomo
"A Story About Sexism in Tech Filled With Sexist Comments Denying Sexism in
Tech" :-)

~~~
ahelwer
It's like any time Anita Sarkeesian is mentioned on reddit, and people take
7000 rageful comments to convince themselves a problem does not exist.

~~~
iamdave
People (reddit and elsewhere, internet and elsewhere) have a crippling mental
condition where if _they_ haven't experienced a problem on a personal level,
it must not exist. It's a glaring logical problem that should be as obvious as
the word "NO" on a 500 foot tall, illuminated billboard.

Yet it keeps happening.

~~~
mpyne
Another logical fallacy I've seen is kind of the contrapositive (if I remember
ethics class correctly): If people hear an anecdote of a problem affecting
someone in a group, the problem exists throughout the entire group.

E.g. the other day Reddit had a story about an atheist who dropped out of West
Point because he felt there was too much religion, which somehow mutated on
some of the subreddits to how all atheists in all of the military branches are
continuously being oppressed (which is far and away untrue).

------
praptak
They included _"A Legitimately Interesting Technical Blog Post"_ , that's
pretty generous :)

~~~
wladimir
Yes, at the bottom slot, with only 3 votes :-)

~~~
RaSoJo
and 0 comments

------
Vivtek
I'm swooning just from Elon Musk's being parodically referenced.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I kept trying to click the upvote button but it didn't work

------
georgeorwell
They should update the list so that when this gets posted for the third time
in 2013, the top item is: "Great HN parody (2012) (linkedlistnyc.org)"

------
mtgx
I thought the funniest was "Why Go can't scale past 2 billion users".

~~~
jamesmiller5
I love that it was submitted by "nodejs4eva"

------
ampersandy
This was posted 60 days ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4621731>.

It also turns up as the first hit for "hacker news parody" or "hn parody" on
Google.

------
khet
"How I remapped my capslock key to be both ESC and Ctrl"

That really got me thinking. Then I realized I was reading a parody. I am
still thinking.

~~~
ovi256
If computer keyboards were velocity sensitive like music keyboards, maybe you
could do it through discriminating touch velocity (force). I imagine it could
be tricky to get used to though! Idea, maybe key down duration could be used
as proxy for velocity, as in, more forceful key press last less?

~~~
Lapsa
someone has to make this happen. imagine - no need for shift/caps_lock keys -
just BASH HARDER your fingers to get uppercase.

------
phatbyte
I love HN but this made me laugh :P, nailed it pretty much. I would just add
"Why X sucks because now I'm learning a trendy hipster new Y that no one knows
of"

------
wyclif
"Latest Daring Fireball Post."

~~~
moepstar
I raise you a "Another boring CloudFlare blogpost full of self-praise".

------
dinkumthinkum
It's missing a post like: "Tech Founder that Graduated from Stanford Says
College Dead, Long Live Blog Learning"

------
timinman
Great articles. Please add: "How Jokes and Parodies are turning HN into
Reddit" :)

------
robryan
"I learnt Haskell and just had to write about it"

"Surely I can spin this Tweet into an article"

"Why latest Apple product is the best thing you have ever seen" - Marco,
Gruber or MG

------
dizzystar
You forgot to add woman-centric posts, like "How I hacked my daughter's brain
into learning Python," or "How I taught 3 girls between the ages of 13 and 55
to love Linux command line."

But this is pretty funny. No MS hate?

~~~
kintamanimatt
The MS hate comes in waves, just like everything else on HN! This is why HN
can become especially addictive to me when the topic du jour appeals to my
interests.

I guess I should write a blog about this, but first I need to get a blog.
Perhaps I could blog about getting a blog so I can blog an analysis of how
HN's topics are both cyclical and wave-like. Both, of course posted to HN at
optimal hours for maximum effect!

------
athgeo
"My 5000 word assessment of (insert latest gadget here) that leaves no doubt
about why absolutely (no-one|everyone) should buy this, conveniently ignoring
that other geeks have their own opinion and the average user doesn't give a
damn"

"10 mistakes that I made during my unsuccessful YC interview, 9 of which PG
probably didn't even notice"

"Show HN: My first (read: I'm younger than you) app I hacked up in less than
20 mins (read: I'm smarter than you), because I had nothing else to do (read:
don't feel too cozy in your job, cuz I'm dropping out of college any day [if
my parents agree, that is])"

"How I made big bucks with something so trivial that I'm surprised my cleaning
lady did not think of it before me"

"Apple is no longer as innovative as they were 5 minutes ago"

Plenty of discussions that mix a lot of fancy Latin expressions and Scotsmen

Recruiter: a derogatory term for somebody that knows less about a specific
field than than the experts in that field they hire

Fanboy: favoriteGadget.brand != other.favoriteGadget.brand

Fanboy of a Recruiter: greatest insult on HN

------
wyclif
"Why C++ Is Not 'Back'."

12 hours later...

"Why C++ Is Back."

------
eurodance
"I got rejected from YC and here's my idea. It still sucks"

------
pkorzeniewski
I laughed at "How I bootstrapped my company in 6 hours (with breaks)" :) I
always wondered why this was a thing on HN, it doesn't matter if something
took one weekend, one month or one year to finish - it's the result that
matters, and saying "I build it in 24h" is the same as saying "it has a lot of
bugs, but I want to launch it anyway".

~~~
omd
Because that's not a company, it's a website. It takes 6 hours just to file
all the paperwork to get a company started.

~~~
blablabla123
It's all about the timing ;)

------
cfontes
This should be pinned somewhere... it's just great :D

~~~
anthonyb
Just wait another two months, and it'll be around again ;)

------
tzaman
This one's old.

~~~
jychang
No it isn't.

~~~
subsystem
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4621731>

------
wiradikusuma
...and somebody would complain why this thing is in the front page, and other
person questioning why HN becoming like Reddit, and someone will downvote the
comment.

..but then some other guy would defend it by saying "but it is hacker-y, etc"

------
ck2
I was a little disappointed some of them didn't link to actual articles.

------
polshaw
How i WISH we could rid ourselves of the _'Contrarian blog post to recently
popular blog post'_ cancer. It's a phenomenon i can't say i even see anywhere
else online.

------
blablabla123
"How I bootstrapped my company in 6 hours (with breaks)" :D

------
Peroni
Would have liked to have seen "Recruiters suck. AMIRITE?"

~~~
atourgates
Don't forget, "Why all MBAs should be forcibly relocated to a deserted island
with no food or water."

~~~
indiecore
but what's wrong with that one?

------
dschiptsov
Sudden realization that HN or Zerohedge or /r/programming/ are just a mass-
media?)) This is a premature enlightenment.)

The next level is a realization that it isn't any different form /b/ - just a
flow of a community-generated content about some buzzwords.))

Well, we must admit that a distribution of our interests is a little bit
broader, but it is a substitution-based activity nevertheless.)

~~~
toyg
I know HN is full of LISP hackers, but there's no need to add random closing
brackets, surely?

~~~
xentronium
For some reason, using closing parens instead of proper smileys with colons
caught on in Russia and some Eastern Europe countries (never seen one from
anyone living in Western Europe).

Not to offend dschiptsov, but (ab)using them is an awful habit to have.

~~~
cxhristian
I have always heard that it was because Russian/Eastern Europe keyboards
doesn't have a colon in their layout, but looking at the layout[0] that
doesn't seem to be true.

But the colon combination is a bit awkward for adding quick smileys (SHIFT+6)
which makes it understandable that one would use )) instead.

A bit unrelated, but I once had a guy trying to scam me on Steam using some
neat chat request trick using a friends name. Disregarding all the other
scamming signs I easily spotted this being another user because of the ))
overuse. I know it is silly, but I can't help but chuckle a little bit when I
see )) or similar.

[0] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KB_Russian.svg>

------
andrewcooke
Comment on some small technical detail that I think is interesting, but that
no-one else cares about.

------
zem
I loved the genuinely parodic headlines ("How I remapped my caps lock key to
be both ESC and Ctrl" was my favourite), but the metaheadlines like "A long
rant about a YC company falling short in some regard" are simply done to death
and IMO have not been funny in years.

------
krmmalik
Haha. This is too funny. I love the twitter post that just _happens_ to have
140 comments!

------
Semiapies
"RMS hates something."

"Woz disagrees with something Apple does."

"Why this wildly successful and profitable company is doomed. Someday."

"Commonly-used technology is obsolete."

"You are not cool enough to succeed, especially if you are in any way
successful. Please develop impostor syndrome."

------
jacques_chester
It's this sort of thing that originally drove me away from /r/programming and
which I continue to find hilarious about HN (and to found a parodic subreddit,
see if you can find it).

------
orthecreedence
You forgot the unlimited "Why I...and you should too" headlines.

------
EddieB
Can't look at the listing in the same way after seeing that haha

------
noonespecial
There should be one on there talking about not talking about karma. I think I
saw a "how I got so much karma on HN" story peak at #4 earlier this week.

------
greghinch
Oh dear, I actually said #28 when we started ours...

------
Joeboy
It's probably best to wear alternate pairs of shoes, so that they get a chance
to dry out and air between outings.

------
deveac
No.22

That's the one that got me. Now pardon me while I write a post about
duplicating comic timing graphically, as a constraint.

------
jliptzin
It's missing "How I solved the travelling salesman problem using pure CSS and
Clojure on my coffee break"

------
markprovan
Nothing about Ruby and scaling? :O

~~~
anthonyb
Everyone knows Ruby doesn't scale! ;)

~~~
raverbashing
Yeah, but apparently you can use Go for the backend and scale up to 2 Billion
users

(And someone will use this fact as a reason to not use Go. Of course their
website will melt after a couple of minutes on the front page of HN because
they forgot to do any basic load testing on their servers and didn't catch
something very simple)

------
chris123
How about a brogrammer or brogrammer-backlash story? Or an "I hate MBAs" one?

------
retube
At least 5 entries should have been new .js libraries. Also no github posts.

------
jcurbo
Needs more Bitcoin stories.

------
nchuhoai
Favorite: Vivek on immigration policies

------
mixedbit
Linked List voting system is broken.

------
bjhoops1
131 self-referential comments

------
rossta
Best HN post ever.

------
JonSkeptic
1 snarky comment

------
scottmagdalein
#22

------
Devilboy
It's funny because it's true

------
Nordvind
Made me smile.

------
return0
Congratulations on your neat website. I think you really should consider
making you're page center aligned - i hurt my head looking left in my bigass
screen. I am very much a fan of wearing the same shoe every 3 days, but i
admit youre article about sexism has changed my life. Unfortunately, since you
don't support openID, i refuse to join your site.

To complete the picture, i would really like to respond here with a very long-
form comment of at least 8 paragraphs, in which i address one by one a number
of points that irritated me in a boastful way that makes my arguments sound
authoritative and deep, while in reality it's just my brain-fart of the
moment. I should also add a couple of references in square brackets, because
that's what scientists do[1] and people seem to believe scientists (what's
more, the most respected scientific journals use the vancouver reference
style, which makes me look even more knowledgable). Because of the
outrageousness of my long-form comment (and because it takes up a large
portion of the screen real estate), people will upvote me and respond with
equally half-cooked comments , some of them applying Godwin's law, and others
merely acknowledging this application of the law.

Unfortunately, i barely made it to 3 paragraphs and i 've more or less run out
of stupid things to say.

Looking forward to the new version of your website that will be implemented in
a single var javascript statement, because that's my favorite programming
paradigm this afternoon.

[1] they really do

