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Why does man print "gimme gimme gimme" at 00:30? (2017)
- varelaz 2y agoI'm against easter eggs, at least right now. First of all not of them are harmless, can you make sure that it wouldn't break anything important, would it tolerate race, religion, gender and after all of these would it remain fun? It's hard to be responsible and fun in the same time.
- 9dev 2y agoWell… I find your conclusion a bit sad, and turned upside down. Instead of banning all things fun for fear of misstepping, maybe it’s time to take things less personally, be more tolerant towards others, and push for positive change instead of trying to punish others for not being ”aware“ enough?
- varelaz 2y agoI'm not trying to punish others, I just don't find it fun anymore with all respect to everyone who keeps up. Before it was naïve and simple, right now it just more complicated, often looks commercialized or not appropriate.
- 9dev 2y agoI didn’t mean to imply you personally aim to punish others, but that we should collectively strive to foster a culture of positivity rather than instilling fear of offending others, until people say nothing at all anymore (or say a lot that doesn’t mean anything).
- _V_ 2y agoWhy on Earth would jokes have to "tolerate" race, religion and gender or anything else? The point of (some) jokes is to challenge anything and everything you deem to be a norm. I'm starting to think that many tolerance-preaching people are the most intolerant bunch by far.
- illys 2y agoWell, my 2-cent is that you can laugth of everything but not with everybody... So defying the norms with Easter Eggs sent to the wild can be an issue. You have to know your audience to properly chose your level of impertinence.
- _V_ 2y agoI completely agree with the first sentence - however I would argue that normal, level-headed and sane person either laughs or just shrugs and moves on if that particular joke is not to their taste.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- aniviacat 2y agoIs the Google "Minecraft" easter egg intolerant of gender? Easter eggs can certainly be problematic when used in APIs (or similar) where access is intended to be automated (and therefore vulnerable to surprises). But in user facing code, easter eggs are perfectly fine.
- varelaz 2y agoIs it just a marketing tool of a mega-corp which tries to look nicer and engage you more?
- aniviacat 2y agoI don't know what your point is. Yes, Google is a corporation and yes, Google tries to build a product people want to use. (Building things that people like is a good thing.)
- varelaz 2y agoI don't say it's bad. It's commercialized experiense and it's cool if you love it. I just wouldn't treat it the same as devs fun of hiding things for valuable user who loves their product and I'm talking from dev prospective, not user.
- ARandomerDude 2y agoI'm sure some companies use easter eggs as marketing/recruiting tools. That said, I've put a small number of user-facing easter eggs in publicly-traded MegaCorp code before. In every case, it was an inside joke among devs that the higher-ups never knew about it. The C-Suite is uptight and we definitely would have been reprimanded if they were aware.
- chuckadams 2y agoIt's an Easter egg, so clearly it's intolerant of other religions!
- w4rh4wk5 2y agoObligatory meme https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KXonMpe4hr8 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KXonMpe4hr8
- sebstefan 2y agoI feel like you can trust `man` to give you exit codes that make sense if you want to determine whether it exited correctly or not It's always shakey to use the length of `stderr` for that
- lockedinspace 2y agoLove these easter eggs, makes you not forget we are all humans
- veunes 2y agoExactly! They're like the bloopers of the tech world
- moatel 2y agoAt 10:31 does it print "man man man"?
- sirsinsalot 2y agoI know someone who was on a team whose proprietary software was decompiled and it still contained the code comments. They were made public. They were horrific. Assume all code may become public.
- jajko 2y agoDepending on language/compiler this is normal, ie Java decompiled will contain all comments. Idiots using nasty comments or test data and then this leaking to management or users is nothing new, always a fireable offense showing immature behavior and lack of professionalism, something any company desperately need in software devs.
- trashburger 2y agoBet you're real fun at parties.
- elif 2y agoDid ANYONE have "automated man calls" on their devops bingo card? I still don't understand what they were trying to accomplish...
- 4gotunameagain 2y agoIf you read the linked question, they say that they were testing the output of "man -w" which prints the path of man pages. I can easily see that as a test for deployment image generation where you want to fiddle with the available man pages and test whether they will be accessible.
- elif 2y agoWho even installs man on production and why though... Gotta be some janky dev-on-prod situation.
- 4gotunameagain 2y agoMaybe you are building images for your employees to use while developing ? Maybe you are building an educational distro image that is accompanied with your product ? I can think of many things, so who knows.
- dbtablesorrows 2y agoI can imagine using man to generate random but realistic text in a test. MANROFFSEQ= MANPAGER=cat man sprintf
- dbtablesorrows 2y agoTurns out this gives some unprintable characters.
- xattt 2y agoI had a QNAP Celeron NAS where I installed Ubuntu because it was out of support. The trouble was that it threw a kernel panic at certain times of the day. I troubleshooted it to no end - reinstalled Linux, did an EFI update. I chalked it up to something I did because I was running 16 GB of RAM when QNAP said max RAM was 8 GB. Fast forward to this year, and it fails to load up completely. It turned out that it was a silicon degradation bug that was a problem with J1900 devices. I wasted so much time over the years trying to troubleshoot something that I could not fix…
- bluedino 2y agoThe best part of stuff like this is all of the other stuff you fixed that you didn't know were broken or wrong, and all the things you learned along the way
- userbinator 2y agoThere is a hardware workaround for those. Involves a little bit of soldering.
- xattt 2y agoI did and it didn’t bring it back. It was its time…
- sambeau 2y agoIf your software is free and the maintainers aren't getting paid then a few Easter eggs are a small price to pay. Colin was being paid, of course, but not primarily for maintaining man. Having said that, I once worked at a company (incidentally one where Colin worked, though after he'd left to join Ubuntu) where a developer added a line to the T&Cs that meant that a user granted their soul to the company. The intention was to check if the execs/legals checked the T&Cs like they promised to. They did not. Many souls were captured.
- eastbound 2y agoIt could make the entire T&C invalid.
- alanbernstein 2y agoWhy, is the soul an established legal concept? Or just the fact that nobody checked the thing?
- opello 2y agoPresumably if the T&C didn't have a severability clause the impossible soul capturing part could be argued to invalidate the entirety.
- lolinder 2y agoDo any T&Cs not have a severability clause? I'm not a lawyer and have written exactly one semi-legal document ever, but even I knew to put one of those in.
- eastbound 2y agoNo, it’s the fact that someone is joking in the ToS, proves that no-one can take it seriously. It would require a phrase like “If any term is considered invalid, it doesn’t invalidate the others”, but even this sentence is not always applicable.
- unethical_ban 2y agoI don't think the minority opinion would have won out of it weren't for social media.
- karaterobot 2y agoMore easter eggs please, not fewer.
- kunley 2y agoPity the author removed it
- justin66 2y agoThis joke only three people are ever going to see is fucking up somebody's automated tests but I'm going to leave it in anyway seems like it would have been a poor approach to take.
- kunley 2y agoI will raise a glass of wine for the good impressions of whoever at 0:30am is taking care of automated tests instead of a glass of wine. kidding, but also: please get the perspective..
- justin66 2y ago> please get the perspective.. There are certainly different points of view here. I'd immediately take the easter egg out because I just assume if I hear about a bug once, I'm going to hear about it again. The selfish reason to fix any bug ASAP: it's an easy way to make life easier for my future self. And yeah, also, why fuckup someone else's tests needlessly. > I will raise a glass of wine for the good impressions of whoever at 0:30am is taking care of automated tests instead of a glass of wine. Automated tests.
- jll29 2y ago[flagged]
- jll29 2y ago[flagged]
- jll29 2y agoGot a good laugh out of this post, thanks.
- dang 2y agoRelated: Why does man print “gimme gimme gimme” at 00:30? (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27994194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27994194 - July 2021 (211 comments) Why does man print “gimme gimme gimme” at 00:30? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15747313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15747313 - Nov 2017 (159 comments) Why does man print “gimme gimme gimme” at 00:30? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15746972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15746972 - Nov 2017 (1 comment) Why does man print “gimme gimme gimme” at 00:30? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15742221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15742221 - Nov 2017 (1 comment)
- waynecochran 2y agoThe ABBA song instantly came into my mind the second I saw it -- I am truly a child of the 80's.
- feralchimp 2y ago"gimme gimme gimme" from man after midnight, you say?
- joemi 2y agoI set up FreePBX at my work when we got rid of our old phone system. We don't need a lot of extensions, so I just used 1xx, 2xx, and 3xx for difference types of extensions and had plenty of numbers leftover for future purposes with those. So I figured to add a little easter egg if anyone ever calls the 666 extension: it plays a clip of Vincent Price's terrifying laugh from the end of Michael Jackson's Thriller. Well, a year or two after I set that up, I got a text early one morning from a coworker who said the phones must have been hacked because they're not working right and whenever they try to call anywhere they hear a scary voice. When I took a look, it turned out that something went wrong somehow and all calls were getting forwarded to the last extension I added, which was 666. Needless to say, people weren't amused by my intended easter egg and felt insulted by the laughter.
- prettywoman 2y ago[dead]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- LordHeini 2y agoAm I the only one to think that this is so incredibly sweet? More software should have these nice little things to remind us stupid little humans of our weird but oh so important humanity.
- gregjw 2y agoEvergreen post, this gets to the front page every 6 months at this point
- clintboxe 2y agoToo many ABBA references and not enough Black Flag. I need some more. Don’t ask what for.
- snvzz 2y ago[flagged]
- hulitu 2y ago> Easter eggs are bugs, plain and simple. And what are bugs then ? I prefer Easter eggs instead of bugs. At least they are intended behaviour.
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y agoYou must hate VLC on Dec 25.
- Anthony-G 2y agoA few years ago, I was suprised to discover that lots of people actually do hate VLC at this most wonderful time of year. Only two of the top 10 search results are broadly positive about this feature: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=vlc+santa+hat+&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=vlc+santa+hat+&ia=web And in a VideoLAN forum thread, at least one user was willing to recompile the source in order to remove the objectionable icon (presumably before it became a configurable option in the application settings): https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=53998 https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=53998
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y agoSome people have a visceral hatred of Christmas due to its heritage. GP appears to only hate easter eggs. A good thing it is open source and one can modify if they wish. I wish I had the skills to remove the things I hate.
- foobarian 2y agoIt's open source and we mold it to the way we like it! Right? One time I decided I would like my workstation login prompt to work like the Monty Python bridge of death and print "what is thy name" etc. instead of the usual login:. Tracking down where exactly this string was turned out to be really hard, I don't even remember exactly but somewhere in PAM source code? Anyway after that I became less quick to tell people "just change the source!"
- addaon 2y agoThis update broke my workflow!
- dudeinjapan 2y agoThis update fixed my workflow. I needed a man after midnight.
- SCUSKU 2y agoRelevant: https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/
- AStonesThrow 2y agoBecause you can tune a filesystem, but you can't tune a fish. https://unixhistory.livejournal.com/1808.html https://unixhistory.livejournal.com/1808.html
- tonetegeatinst 2y agoAh but you can tune a fish. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2y92obnsc0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2y92obnsc0
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y agoI prefer all bah corps.
- chriscjcj 2y agohttps://youtu.be/XEjLoHdbVeE?t=68 https://youtu.be/XEjLoHdbVeE?t=68
- HackerQED 2y agoA fun idea, but it should not be put in the ordinary flow. It will hurt users. `man -abba` would be nicer, as the author said in the original post.
- DonHopkins 2y ago$ man --abba --format=json ["gimme", "gimme", "gimme"]
- kevincox 2y agoThe first answer explains that it was only supposed to trigger on error cases (no page specified) but due to an oversight also triggered if you specified a man page by the --path flag (rather than just the page name)
- thih9 2y agoIt has been removed, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41738239 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41738239
- worstspotgain 2y agoNarada Michael Walden came to mind, instead of Abba. Guess I'm both too old and too young. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrnUuXiVgBc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrnUuXiVgBc Edit: It's also a way better song, no wonder I remember it better.
- jeltz 2y agoNo idea what you mean about being too old and too young. The ABBA song is from 1979 and the Narada song in 1985, just 6 years later.
- worstspotgain 2y agoToo young to remember Abba's song when it was new, too old to not remember Narada's song and get confused by it.
- IgorPartola 2y agoSorry time: years ago I worked on a telemedicine web app before telemedicine was nearly as popular as it is today. Part of the application had patients filling out questionnaires online to show answers to the doctors. We were onboarding different parts of a large healthcare system throughout all this (cardio, GI, etc.) and each had questionnaires that required different logic for when and how to display the questions, so the application had a fairly powerful system for driving the conditional logic of when questions do and do not show up. Well one day I am working on a new set of features to help support the new clinic that’s coming online and for whatever reason the question that should by all rights show up, does not. As I am getting deeper into debugging why, I pepper the code with nonsensical and slightly angry debug statements that show up alongside the questions. After solving the problem I happily clean up and commit the fixed code and move onto the next thing. Well, it turns out I didn’t clean up all the debug statements. The statement I left in said I SEE YOU!!! in big red letters if you answered a particular set of questions in a particular way. This was discovered by a patient. Of the psychiatric clinic that just came online. On the questionnaire meant to evaluate paranoia. Since then I have started using things like aaa and 111 as my debug markers.
- veunes 2y agoThis sounds like one of those lessons you never forget - the hard way!
- xnorswap 2y agoThis is why I enjoy writing C#/.Net, I don't need to deal with nonsense like print debugging. I don't think I'd be anywhere near as productive without: - Conditional breakpoints - Debugger.Launch - Debugger.Break - Debugger.Write Conditional breakpoints are essential, just run as normal and it'll only break when your bizarre edge case is hit. Debugger.Break and Debugger.Launch are like a breakpoint that gets hit even when you're not debugging, and prompts you to attach a debugger. ( Launch won't pause if you already have one attached, but especially useful when you want to attach to a start-up routine in an IIS hosted web-app. ) Debugger.Write writes to a different output stream, and like all Diagnostic.Debug statements, isn't even compiled into release builds, so there's zero chance of it ending up in prod. These are essential tools for rapid debugging. Printing nonsense and hoping to spot it feels 20+ years out of date.
- hirsin 2y agoIt's not my first time seeing this, but I'm struck by some disappointment in the legacy of OSS here. The author clearly understood what was happening enough to post this to the unix SO - but not enough to find the `man` code and grep for the string that had to be present? I'll admit I don't immediately know where to go to look for the source code, but I can't imagine it's some tightly held secret address to a file share somewhere. Alternatively - maybe it wasn't the difficulty of finding it but the (perceived?) difficulty in requesting that it be changed? E - maybe the likely alternative is the "the customer has nukes so please fix it" entitlement? https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=95644#c4 https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=95644#c4
- gavindean90 2y agoWhat does this have to do with the link?
- jdnbndhxb 2y agoIt's a nice anecdote, don't think too much about it
- MiguelX413 2y agoNo.
- strken 2y agoI don't see Bill as doing anything wrong here. Given that he works for Cray on their own Fortran compiler, it seems reasonable that he would be allowed to report bugs in the competing product gfortran but not allowed to actually fix fix them, and that he would ask a question knowing full well that the answer would be "fuck you, pay me" just to be able to truthfully report that back up the chain. The nuclear-armed client seems entitled, but I don't think he necessarily is.
- eloisant 2y agoNukes or not, telling open source developers "the customer is asking for it" twice is either entitled or very ignorant.
- krick 2y agoI hate such "jokes" so much. I just need to say it. Obviously, me saying that won't change anything, I don't even believe there is a minor possibility that anyone reading this may remember it in the future and know better than doing something like that, but, really, I hate it so, so, so much. As if there's not enough semi-intended weird behaviors in all our systems. Of course, I won't pretend that I believe that if not for the things like that we could live in a world where technology actually exists to save our time, not to spend more time on maintaining technology. What a silly idea. The majority of people on this forum only exist to maintain the technology. But still, there's no more mind-numbing, infuriating, exhausting feeling, than to find out that a thing you were debugging for the last hour was supposed to be a "fun little joke". Fun? You know what's fun: when stuff just works. That's about the most fun thing there is.
- wodenokoto 2y agoHN is obviously not where you’ll find people sympathetic to this point of view, but in the grander scheme of things, the no-Easter-eggs attitude won out
- appendix-rock 2y agoThe no-Easter-egg attitude ‘won out’c sure. There’s not much else you can conclude from that, though. Not even that it’s the popular opinion.
- keybored 2y agoThis is OSS. So it is impossible to have a rational discussion on it here—OSS has the halo of No Warranties And If You Complain You Are Entitled. Including intentionally adding things that turn to break things in the most puzzling, Heisenbug-looking way.[1] [1] It doesn’t work after midnight???
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- wetpaws 2y ago[dead]
- thih9 2y agoNote that it’s no longer there. > The developer of the man-db, Colin Watson, decided that there was enough fun and the story won't get forgotten and removed the easter egg completely. https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/man-db.git/commit/?id=b225d9e76fbb0a6a4539c0992fba88c83f0bd37e https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/man-db.git/commit/?id=b225...
- m463 2y agoI just tried it on an old raspberry pi and it is there. (based on debian 9 stretch)
- blahyawnblah 2y agoYou can't really expect that old of a version of Debian to be up to date
- thih9 2y agoThis can be your reason to update to a non-EOL system.
- cyptus 2y agoat a discussion about this issue i read a comment which i cant find right now but was very beautiful. It was saying that we should keep easter eggs like this, because in the end this is what differs us humans from machines.
- Sparkyte 2y agoEaster eggs like this show the quality of the work. Very charming and awesome!
- larodi 2y agoCoding must be fun, using code too. Guys did right. This whole idea of opensource having to be coldstone serious is only because of corporations running it. But you see, when a program is being written by myself and my brov, I'd put easter eggs all over it, just ot remind people there were people on the other end of the line.
- Etheryte 2y agoYeah, definitely agreed, there's few things as fun and satisfying as a well hid easter egg. Doubly so if what you're working on is surrounded by a lot of red tape. My personal favorite is a Rick Roll I managed to hide in the source code of a government application I helped fix years ago on a consulting gig. The only way you'd find it is if you're a developer working on a very specific subsystem, but if you do find it, you'll know why it's there from the context.
- bauerd 2y ago>I'd put easter eggs all over it, just ot remind people there were people on the other end of the line Most people won't come across your Easter egg since it's hidden. The ones that do encounter it will likely stumble over it, as did the OP, who had their CI pipeline broken. I think easter eggs are a poor tool to "remind people there were people on the other end of the line". Edit: at least outside of entertainment software
- fkyoureadthedoc 2y agoOh no, anything but the pipeline run!
- mrguyorama 2y agoIf your build pipeline depends on "man -w" and you don't work on man, the easter egg wasn't the problem.
- rendall 2y agoAgreed. I'm really trying but failing to come up with a non-screwed-up scenario where this Easter egg legitimately breaks a well-planned testing suite.
- tempestn 2y agoAnyone have a hypothesis why there would be a test that calls man without arguments? Is the goal just to check that man is installed? Even so, you'd think you'd test the command as it's normally used...
- kevincox 2y agoReading the answer it seems that the easter egg accidentally also triggered if you pass the page to load via --path. This was then fixed later (and then even later the whole easter egg was removed).
- caymanjim 2y agoI'm pretty sure the Stack Overflow question was contrived nonsense just so the other dude could tell his story in public.
- int_19h 2y agoIt's discussed extensively in the comments on the linked SO question. The short answer: > Because we wanted the "manpath" - 'man -w'
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Ekaros 2y agoAutomated test that verifies something like just build image installs correctly and man produces expected output?
- thrdbndndn 2y agoAfter reading the whole thing there seems to be no explanation why it was changed from 0001 to 0030?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ARandomerDude 2y ago> Let's mention that the initial commit triggered at 12:01am. A followup commit changed that to 12:30am with the commit log message "half past twelve" which is again quoted from the same song
- winwang 2y agoBut 12:30am is 30 past twelve!
- blipvert 2y agoCheck the lyrics
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- martypitt 2y agoWhat a lovely, civil exchange. (I hope that the tone on the socials at the time was just as civil). Developer plants an easter egg. It was a good one ... and it was a reasonable assumption it wasn't gonna break anything. Several people have a good chuckle. Someone gets affected negatively by it, so the developer says, "fair play, that wasn't the intent, let's remove it". Everyone hugs it out and moves on. I have no idea if this was the full story, or if his Twitter was aflame with negativity, but I imagine if this happened today, the tone would be much more combative than the exchange on the Stack Overflow page (eg: this HN thread, which is full of 'Easter Eggs Bad! Bugs!') -- which is a real shame. If humour be the bugs of life, play on.
- mjmsmith 2y agoStack Exchange comments are where humor goes to die^H^H^Hbe moved to chat.
- klez 2y agoConsider that SE comments are heavily moderated. Unfortunately if you read the chat linked in the comments (which got moved from the comments section) it's everything but fun and games. Also apparently the developer who suggested the feature had to set their twitter to private because he was getting bashed for this.
- bradley13 2y agoThat's a shame, but (sadly) not unexpected. Humorous people who take themselves far too seriously. The negativity was explained decades ago by the "Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory". Sadly, things have not improved.
- tlrobinson 2y ago> Fixed in master: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/man-db.git/commit/?id=84bde8d8a9a357bd372793d25746ac6b49480525 https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/man-db.git/commit/?id=84bd... Waiting for the bug report that the fix broke someone’s workflow. https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/
- rcarmo 2y agoOh man. I read the title and had immediate ABBA flashbacks, which I think kind of dates me…
- noja 2y agoRead the article...
- BLKNSLVR 2y agoAlmost totally off topic, but I love the scenario. Great song to roller disco to. Great beat, great build up. Prior to taking up roller skating (inline) I wouldn't have given the song much credence, but I get a little surge of adrenaline just thinking about having weaved through crowds of noobs with this song pumping.