[HN Gopher] Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API
___________________________________________________________________
Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 273 points
Date : 2025-06-16 00:14 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (voxelmanip.se)
(TXT) w3m dump (voxelmanip.se)
| dylan604 wrote:
| How is someone writing an article about Android source code node
| nerdy enough to know what a Tricoder is? I don't buy it
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Right? It could be an attempt at humor, but it could also be
| someone who is naive of culture before 2003. I lost some
| respect for the author at that point...
| snapcaster wrote:
| This is so american/age centric please reconsider dispensing
| respect based on who watched the same TV shows as you growing
| up
| kretaceous wrote:
| They are in their early 20s and not American1. Why is that so
| hard to grasp?
|
| 1: https://voxelmanip.se/about/
| dylan604 wrote:
| Funny, when I was in my 20s and not British, I knew what a
| Dalek was because it was just part of the zeitgeist.
| Tricoders are frequently mentioned as one of the life
| imitating art type of things that modern tech is striving to
| take from sci-fi to IRL. I had never even seen an episode of
| Dr Who, but I was familiar with it because of all the other
| sci-fi/nerdy stuff I was into. Ironically, I did know what
| someone wearing an H on their forehead meant from watching
| Red Dwarf, but that's a tangent. It just seems like a strange
| Venn diagram where source code android and Star Trek tricoder
| do not intersect would be a very odd diagram
| eCa wrote:
| > the other sci-fi/nerdy stuff I was into
|
| I guess that's your answer. People have different interests
| and as such there's a virtually unlimited number of culture
| combinations that people can be into. And people can have
| white spots in places that are surprising to others,
| there's only so much time.
| perching_aix wrote:
| I think you hit the nail on the head there, you and the
| author are simply from different cultural zeitgeists. I
| also remember Star Trek and Dr Who being a big deal, but I
| was entirely too young to care. And I continue not to care,
| since I don't watch live action shows much. Never seen an
| episode of Friends or Game of Thrones either for example.
| Just a starkly different generation and subculture.
| ROllerozxa wrote:
| Indeed. There is such an immense amount of media that is
| produced from decade to decade that nobody can ever know
| everything and understand "all" the references. Things
| that may seem like "things everyone know about" vary
| wildly between location and year ranges, and in the
| recent decades with the Internet there are just so many
| subcultures that all could be classified as "nerdy" but
| which lack a lot of overlap.
|
| I suppose I'm too young to have watched Star Trek when it
| was _really popular_ (and have all sorts of other blind
| spots when it comes to TV shows and other media even for
| people my age), but I 've definitively heard about it.
| And I know some other references to it like Spock and the
| Vulcan salute, but the Tricorder had completely missed me
| until now.
|
| Also, with something like GRAVITY_DEATH_STAR_I I could
| pretty easily tell it was a reference to something
| fictional (in that case Star Wars) since there is
| obviously no celestial body with that name. But with the
| Tricorder I was looking to actually make sure it's not
| some kind of actually real but vestigial hardware sensor
| thing that Android might have supported in the 00s,
| tangentially related to the Tricorder that was on Star
| Trek. I have certainly witnessed stranger coincidences.
|
| Like Android still has functionality in the API for
| supporting trackballs, which I know used to be on some
| really early Android phones. So if that had been among
| the list as "there's this joke input device called a
| 'trackball' in the API, implying there are phones with a
| big physical ball you can roll around to move a cursor on
| the screen", that would be quite silly. Because it was a
| real and used thing in the past, even though nowadays
| it's more of a legacy feature (though might be a bad
| example as I assume you can connect input devices over
| USB or Bluetooth that may be treated as a trackball by
| Android).
| jaoane wrote:
| It's tricorder not tricoder.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Clearly, I was never a Trekkie.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Or your babelfish has a head cold.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Maybe my towel muffled it so I misheard it?
| sorenjan wrote:
| I think you're underestimating how Americanized Swedes are.
| matsemann wrote:
| Who needs Star Trek when you have Vintergatan?
| kalleboo wrote:
| The age makes sense, but Swedes are definitely into Star Trek
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.P.O.C.K
| Agentlien wrote:
| While I found it surprising at first I don't think it should
| be. Star Trek really doesn't seem to be as big as it used to
| be.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Probably because it was dormant for a long time. And then
| when it was brought back, it was brought back by people who
| have no clue what made Star Trek good so it has largely
| sucked.
| ben_w wrote:
| With the benefit of hindsight, I'd say that impression is
| more because every series is very different. TOS and TAS
| may have been similar to TNG seasons 1 and 2, but TNG got
| more thoughtful as it went on; DS9 was a very different
| show to both TOS and TNG, with long-term continuity and
| changes (beyond casting) that stuck, and far more shades of
| grey and where outright evil came with a smile and a
| charismatic speech rather than being a puddle of psychic
| oil; VOY had almost no continuity, making it the polar
| opposite of DS9, but most of the characters were
| interesting enough for a space soap opera; ENT was derided
| by many when it came out, because all the main plot arcs
| made no sense and they kept introducing old fan favourites
| that didn't make sense contextually because series set in
| the show's future had yet to meet the Borg, the Ferengi,
| etc. And while I've never seen Prodigy, I'm aware that was
| trying for a very different approach to exploring the
| cannon and had its own story to tell.
|
| And famously, only the even-numbered films are any good
| (which doesn't mean all even films are good, e.g. Nemesis).
|
| In this light: DIS throwing away an interesting premise and
| then going nuts; PIC being three seasons of "why did the
| scriptwriters put the Borg everywhere, when the main story
| is androids vs. Romulans, Q, and warcrimes(*?) against
| changelings leading to changeling terrorism?"; and the very
| much more pew-pew-lasers action films of Kelvin**... none
| of this is particularly shocking.
|
| What's nice (for people like me) is that SNW and LD are
| both well-written and thoughtful -- but again, very
| different shows.
|
| SNW feels like it is trying to be the best of TOS, TNG, and
| DS9, even if it does have a bit of fan service with
| insufficiently justified presence of Kirk (James, the other
| one is fine).
|
| LD is very very silly, but it works for me -- not as a
| canonical set of events (Mariner is even less suitable a
| personality for a ship officer than is Burnham, and in the
| same way I can head-cannon all Q episodes as "Q is actually
| Barclay on the holodeck having a power fantasy", most of
| the main four cast feel to me like students LARPing trek on
| a holodeck), but rather I like it because the tries to
| "yes, and..." the show's existing cannon in ways that
| mostly work and the characters are fundamentally decent to
| each other 95% of the time (and when not, justified).
|
| * Perhaps "crimes against humanity" would be a closer take,
| or whatever the term should be in a not-just-humans
| universe
|
| ** and Section 31 whose critical response is so low that I
| forgot it existed rather than watch it, and only remembered
| the existence of when looking at Wikipedia to check if
| Nemesis was even or odd
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I think that while each show was different, all the Star
| Trek shows from TOS to VOY had a certain feel to them
| that made them feel consistent. Yes TOS was more
| swashbuckling and DS9 was more interested in continuity
| and shades of grey, but they all were similar in that
| they were thoughtful shows where teams of competent
| professionals solved problems in the context of a
| generally positive vision for humanity, all while trying
| to offer moral dilemmas for the viewer to wrestle with.
|
| But modern Star Trek is by and large nothing like that.
| The Abrams movies I'm ok with, because to be honest the
| old Trek movies had plenty of "it's just a fun action
| movie" too. But DIS and PIC both seem to positively revel
| in a pessimistic vision of the future where everyone
| sucks. Where we once got stories where the writers were
| smart enough to let viewers draw their own conclusions
| and apply them to real life (mostly, there were preachy
| episodes too), the modern shows are a blatant soapbox for
| the writers to preach to us about their views on the
| world. Where we once had teams of competent professionals
| using their skills to solve problems, now we have
| characters who act like children and only know how to
| apply "hit it real hard" as a solution.
|
| It is a very damning statement that the best (and for a
| while, only) modern show to live up to Star Trek is The
| Orville, which isn't even a Star Trek show! But say what
| you will about him, Seth MacFarlane _gets_ Star Trek and
| he loves it (unlike Alex Kurtzman, may he never get
| another TV series). So he made something which (comedy
| tone aside) could easily be a successor to the Star Trek
| shows of old.
|
| The only exception to the dismal trend is SNW, at least
| the first season. I haven't gotten around to watching
| more yet, but that show was what CBS should've been
| making all along instead of the garbage that was DIS and
| PIC. Suddenly we are explorers in the positive future, we
| are competent professionals again... it's actually a
| worthy Star Trek for once. I would say I think that some
| of the casting choices aren't always great (their Kirk
| is... not suited to the role), and I would enjoy if they
| could move further away from the action show tropes and
| have more thoughtful writing (though _not_ preachy
| please, I 'll take dumb action over the writers preaching
| to me). That is why I said Star Trek has _largely_
| sucked, because SNW is an exception. But in general I
| have felt like the current creative staff doesn 't
| understand Star Trek at all and can't make a good show to
| save their lives.
| ben_w wrote:
| > But modern Star Trek is by and large nothing like that.
| The Abrams movies I'm ok with, because to be honest the
| old Trek movies had plenty of "it's just a fun action
| movie" too. But DIS and PIC both seem to positively revel
| in a pessimistic vision of the future where everyone
| sucks. Where we once got stories where the writers were
| smart enough to let viewers draw their own conclusions
| and apply them to real life (mostly, there were preachy
| episodes too), the modern shows are a blatant soapbox for
| the writers to preach to us about their views on the
| world. Where we once had teams of competent professionals
| using their skills to solve problems, now we have
| characters who act like children and only know how to
| apply "hit it real hard" as a solution.
|
| I've not noticed a difference in the preaching, TBH, but
| otherwise yes.
|
| And also that PIC took many interesting side characters
| from TNG, and used them as redshirts. Maddox, Hugh,
| Icheb, Shelby... and both Picard and Data in season 1 --
| and worse for both. Data because Data was (a) brought
| back the wrong way (should've been him in B4's body
| properly and not the simulation), and (b) that version of
| him wasn't given an appropriate reason for seeking his
| own death, and they really could've done it quite easily
| by writing that Data to have a plot point of ~ "I don't
| want my friends to die, I will choose death again to save
| them". Picard because it was such a missed opportunity,
| not only to give Patrick Stewart the same makeup that
| Brent Spiner had had for all those years, but also
| because Q said he still had a synthetic body in season 2
| and yet they had him getting a "neural stabiliser" for
| "his brain".
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > Star Trek really doesn't seem to be as big as it used to
| be.
|
| Hint: it was never big outside of the USA. If anything,
| Internet and the Hollywood reboots is the way most people
| outside of the USA learnt about it.
|
| Also try to find Europe in the article: https://en.wikipedia.
| org/wiki/Cultural_influence_of_Star_Tre...
| riffraff wrote:
| Are you sure?
|
| I'm Italian and we had Star Trek (all the films, all the
| shows, many of the books), and apparently the Star Trek
| Italian Club[0] was funded in 1982. I think Spock and Kirk
| were quite familiar to most people, and for sure as a nerd
| in the '00s everybody understood the joke of showing Bill
| Gates as a Borg on Slashdot.
|
| [0] https://stic.it/
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > , and for sure as a nerd in the '00s _everybody_
| understood the joke of showing Bill Gates as a Borg on
| Slashdot.
|
| Everybody, Gates and Slashdot in one sentence.
| lynx97 wrote:
| > Hint: it was never big outside of the USA.
|
| Really? I must have grown up in an alternative universe.
| Star Trek TOS and TNG were aired on our local TV station in
| the 80s and 90s, IIRC even in the afternoon. I would be
| extremely surprised if I'd meet a 30+ person who grew up
| here (European country) and didn't know Star Trek.
| pavlov wrote:
| That's just not true.
|
| Both TOS and TNG aired in various European countries.
| kriro wrote:
| Very big in Germany imo. I came back from school and always
| watched back to back TNG and MacGyver. TNG and DS9 were big
| and aired nationally. My father grew up with Kirk & Spock
| and most people who were children in that generation and
| had access to a TV know the show, because there was not
| much else on TV. He's not a nerd at all :)
| t_mahmood wrote:
| It was aired even in Bangladesh (a tiny country in Asia),
| and I just fell in love with TNG, and the line: "Space the
| final frontier ..."
| Agentlien wrote:
| I was never a big Star Trek fan, but here in Sweden growing
| up I watched episodes of The Next Generation, Voyager, and
| Deep Space Nine when they happened to be on. There
| definitely always seemed to be some Star Trek series
| running in a decent TV slot and everyone seemed aware of it
| - even if its popularity was eclipsed by that of Star Wars.
|
| From friends and family in Belgium it seems it was somewhat
| bigger there.
| olvy0 wrote:
| Adding to the comments: Not an American, but like others
| here watched TNG every day after school, and TOS before
| that. Many other people my age did, for example my wife.
|
| BTW, we have watched with our sons all of TNG and DS9 for
| the last 3 years, and our eldest is now deeply familiar
| with Star Trek as a result. Very few of his peers are
| familiar with it, though.
| kalleboo wrote:
| There's a Swedish Star Trek-themed band that has been
| continually active since 1988 and are popular enough that
| they still do festivals in Sweden, Germany and other
| European countries every year
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.P.O.C.K
| la_oveja wrote:
| im 30 yo and i didnt know what a tricoder was
| kallistisoft wrote:
| I'm sorry... please take this adorable tribble as a
| consolation!
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| sounds like trouble
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| My fellow old person, Deep Space Nine came out 32 years ago.
| It's not something the nerds of today need to know. All these
| great sources of nerd allusions will be lost in time, like
| tears in rain.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Nerds gatekeeping nerds. Truly old internet moment.
| u5wbxrc3 wrote:
| Not every interest comes with age. I am interesed in some
| antique stuff that's way older than me.
| filoleg wrote:
| Not every nerdy person is into Star Trek?
|
| Star Wars is imo way more mainstream than Star Trek these days
| (especially with Disney pumping it), but even then there are
| tons of people in their 20s working in tech who haven't seen it
| and have no interest in it.
|
| I don't think there was more than one person on my previous
| Android team who would've gotten the Tricoder reference, and I
| was the youngest person there (29 years old at the time;
| learned about Tricoder literally just from this thread myself).
|
| If you picked a random person working on Android source code
| and asked me to guess whether they know about Tricoder (without
| knowing any additional info about them), I would have
| decisively guessed "no".
| rs186 wrote:
| About a decade ago I started watching Star Wars movies for
| the first time, when there were "only" 6 movies to finish.
| But by then there were already 12+ Star Trek movies plus TV
| series. I decided that I'd "choose" Star Wars, and that was
| enough for me. I am sure Star Trek is a fascinating universe,
| and I see it mentioned all the time, but I don't think I care
| about it enough to ever go into that world.
| filoleg wrote:
| Yeah, pretty much the same for me.
|
| Plus, Star Wars universe just felt way more interesting and
| fascinating to me than Star Trek as a kid.
|
| Star Wars felt like knights and wizards and jet fighter
| pilots and heroic adventures in space, Star Trek felt like
| "adults doing boring adult things... but in space". Not
| trying to dismiss ST, clearly it has a lot of appeal to
| tons of people, but it had zero appeal to me as a child.
|
| It also helped that SW universe had some of my favorite
| games at that time, like SW:Demolition (vehicle combat
| genre, similar to Twisted Metal), Jedi Knight series,
| Knights of The Old Republic, etc.
| rs186 wrote:
| Star Wars and Star Trek mean very little to people outside
| "Western" countries. If you go to China, most people won't
| understand a thing about Star Wars, including computer
| nerds/science fiction fans. And they live their life just fine.
|
| Don't assume certain things that happened during a certain
| period are universal to everybody.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| China, I would expect not to know about Western cultural
| phenomena. But Star Trek references made it into Japanese
| animation like the Daicon IV opening (1983) and Dirty Pair
| (1985?) and quite a few others. It was a globally popular
| series.
| TrianguloY wrote:
| If you want to test the isUserAGoat and isUserAMonkey on you own
| device, I published this small app that does just that:
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.trianguloy...
|
| Maybe I can add these other easter eggs...
| mixermachine wrote:
| On my device with Android 15 I can't install your app. Google
| enforces a minimum compielSdk now. Maybe you can upgrade it in
| your build :)?
| itsTyrion wrote:
| If you check the app description, there's a GitHub link,
| which in turn has an f-droid link you can use.
|
| But you're not missing out since `isUserAGoat()` will return
| false on Android >=11 anyway and `isUserAMonkey()` will
| return true if and only if you're using the monkey test
| suite.
| ROllerozxa wrote:
| That would be quite fun, especially if you would have some
| thing that checks the DISALLOW_FUN policy. While doing a quick
| search on GitHub while reading the blog post to see if any
| Android apps with available source code were using it, all that
| came up were repositories containing code for the system
| Settings app locking away the version easter egg based on it.
| You might become the first third-party to use it!
| londons_explore wrote:
| Notice how pretty much none of these are added in the last 10
| years?
|
| Android's become 'more mature' - ie. Boring, and the joke to code
| ratio is dropping rapidly.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| Good, I hate 'funny' code. Just get to the point, I'm not here
| for someone's notionally hilarious inside joke from 18 years
| ago.
| girvo wrote:
| Ah I see you're one of those who would enable
| `UserManager.DISALLOW_FUN`!
|
| I personally quite enjoy a bit of whimsy in code. What we do
| (mostly) isn't that serious (modulo those, including me once
| upon a time, who work on literal life and death software)
| jrockway wrote:
| I agree with you. The dinosaur game in Chrome is the
| classic example; turned off because schools threatened to
| not buy Chromebooks if kids could play a game in the
| browser. At least it seems to be a setting now, so your
| individual locality can decide if fun is allowed.
| joshstrange wrote:
| That's quite different from what we're talking about
| though. That's adding games or fun into your product
| whereas in this specific sub-thread we're talking about
| naming code concepts (functions, classes, variables,
| enums, etc) funny things.
| notpushkin wrote:
| When you're building an API, it is your product.
| potatolicious wrote:
| Not to mention even just this article exposed a just-for-
| fun API that ended up having a negative effect and had to
| be removed:
|
| `isUserAGoat` ended up allowing any caller to determine
| if a specific app is installed on the system, which is a
| privacy violation and allows fingerprinting against the
| user's consent.
|
| I get the desire to make the job more fun than just
| implementing a spec, but many of the things we work on
| are very important and very complex, with oodles of real-
| world consequences. That unfortunately means everything
| we do has to be well-considered and not off-the-cuff.
| pineappletooth wrote:
| Well it was not an issue back then since any app was able
| to query certain arbitrary specific apps (and yes some
| apps used to query a big list).
|
| They disabled the "fun" function in android 11 with the
| arrive of the QUERY_ALL_PACKAGES permission.
| nlnn wrote:
| I don't mind either personally, but I've had a few
| occasions where such things have caused issues with
| engineers that didn't have English as a 1st language.
|
| A fair bit of time was wasted on trying to understand some
| joke/pun code and variable names, and on another occasion,
| spending the best part of a day working on something
| because they took some sarcasm in code/comments literally.
| nick__m wrote:
| English is not my native language yet I love pun and joke
| in doc. If those hypothetical developers are wasting time
| on this, maybe they should just get better at English
| because there are important nuances that will fly over
| theirs head.
| izacus wrote:
| I think that's a big line between people who work as
| software engineers becuase they enjoy the work and want to
| build something and folks who go there to punch the ticket
| and run back home as soon as possible.
|
| The second group doesn't want to deal with "all the fun
| crap" and "distractions" that stand in the way of them
| marking a bug fixed (or, god forbid, actually getting extra
| bugs/work assigned because some "fun" code might break or
| cause confusion).
|
| As teams and companies grow, the second group usually
| outgrows the first and the first group moves on to reform
| into smaller teams working on something else again.
| sdeframond wrote:
| Things that seem fun when they are written are often not
| much so a few years later, without the initial context,
| when trying to actually "build something".
|
| Fun is good when it is fresh. Fossilized fun is not that
| fun. It is more like that uncle who heavily tries to be
| fun at family parties.
| owebmaster wrote:
| Google is not fun and people that try to be funny from
| Google are cringe
| salawat wrote:
| The young one speaks with enlightenment beyond their
| years. If only we could all be so blessed.
| thorin wrote:
| Harking back to the days when people at Apple, Microsoft,
| Google and Bell Labs had fun. It really happened,
| allegedly!
| acheron wrote:
| Right? I like jokes in programming. I do not like jokes
| coming from the evil dystopian megacorp that ruined the
| Internet.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| I have had my share of fun things I added to
| code/environment. Yet then we add 'the new guy'. They
| spend a long time arguing why that humor should not be
| there. One project it was a single line comment about new
| beginnings on the main procedure. That created a 2 hour
| rant about how unprofessional it was and months of
| unwarranted verbal abuse. It was literally the only piece
| of humor in the entire codebase. Super petty. Turned a
| fun functioning team into a slog of even wanting to go
| into work and all the rest of team reassigning themselves
| to other work. I use it as a litmus test these days of
| what I want to work with. Kind of tempted to add it to
| interview questions but have not found a proper way to do
| it.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Better to reassign 'the new guy', rather than let him
| destroy the team.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| Exactly. However, that would mean the boss thought the
| same, as he was hired specifically for that team. By the
| time it had happened the boss had not even noticed.
| Despite the team basically telling him every day in 50
| different nice ways. In this case I did not realize it
| was controlling and manipulative behavior. But I learned
| and can spot it off pretty quickly now and will make sure
| it does not happen again.
| ramon156 wrote:
| Live a little. When you've passed away, was all the
| seriousness paid off?
|
| That said, funny code should still work
| magospietato wrote:
| There's a middle ground for sure. I've left a few witty
| comments and loglines in my time.
|
| But I've also had to debug a Delphi unit which returned
| error codes inspired by the magical supercomputer Hex from
| the Discworld novels.
|
| "Divide by cucumber error" is not a decent enough
| representation of a module's internal state, no matter how
| funny you think you are.
| tikhonj wrote:
| But a wholly non-funny "Invariant Violated" message would
| be no better. The problem isn't that the message is
| funny, but that it does not contain the information you
| need to understand what's going on. The whimsy is just a
| distraction.
| eptcyka wrote:
| Do you find that distracting things help you debug shoddy
| code?
| arccy wrote:
| if "divide by cucumber" is a unique string in the code
| base, then yes?
| wiseowise wrote:
| Right. And how many of those can your brain fit?
| maccard wrote:
| Doesn't matter. The important thing is that I can look
| them up or resolve them easily. Without looking it up can
| you tell me the difference between HTTP 451 and 510? If
| not they're no more useful than I'm a teapot. But I can
| identify both of those uniquely and figure out where
| they're coming from.
| notpushkin wrote:
| You can remember some of those by heart. Everybody knows
| what 404 means nowadays.
|
| 451 is also a bit whimsical btw - and that actually helps
| remember what it stands for (Unavailable For Legal
| Reasons).
| tikhonj wrote:
| This is a great example where humor can help: I love
| http.cat because the whimsy makes it _easier_ to look up
| and remember status codes. Not exactly the same as jokes
| in code, but an example of how more humor can be better
| than less humor for practical, human-factors reasons.
|
| https://http.cat/451 and https://http.cat/510 for
| reference
|
| 451 is a bit of a niche joke (took me a bit to realize it
| was Ray Bradbury), but 510 is definitely going to help me
| remember "not extended" :P
| tikhonj wrote:
| They don't hurt, and it's fun to come across them. If the
| funny thing is used in one place, it can be memorable and
| easier to search for. If it's the equivalent of "error
| [error]" or whatever, I honestly don't care.
| dotancohen wrote:
| "Divide by cucumber error" sounds like a great string to
| grep for - so actually helpful for developers to find the
| place in the code that threw it.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Who cares what happens after you've passed away. You're
| dead.
| Scarblac wrote:
| Only the things that remain of you after death really
| matter, everything else will have gone completely then
| anyway.
| wiseowise wrote:
| No, even those don't matter. You're dead.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| There are other people in the world.
|
| Similar to not caring at all about the rest of society
| when you're alive, not caring at all about the rest of
| society when you're dead makes for a shitty society. You
| are not the world, there is an external reality (with
| people in it!), and you have obligations to it. I'm not a
| religious person, but it seems to me that religion helps
| or used to help with such things.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| To me, now alive, those things that will endure after I
| die matter to me now, _because_ they will endure after I
| die.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Who cares what happens after you've passed away._
|
| Every single person who isn't you.
|
| You are aware there are other people besides you, right?
| wiseowise wrote:
| The original comment said about doing it for yourself.
| reaperducer wrote:
| The point stands.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| Not having to understand someone's goofy inside joke gives
| me more time to spend on the things that matter the most to
| me. So: less funny code == living a little more.
| joshstrange wrote:
| I couldn't agree more. I work in a codebase that has a
| handful of these "fun"-named functions/concepts and I hate
| it. It wasn't funny the first time I came across it (just
| very confusing) and it's not fun having to explain to new
| hires why a few things are named the way they are.
|
| It needlessly complicates reading/following the code. Even if
| you explain the naming back at where you define the
| function/variable it add an extra click-through/hover to read
| that and an extra translation you have to do in your head
| when you read the "fun" variable name in the future.
|
| One example is we have a flag called "dinnerbell". What does
| that do? It tells the server receiving that flag to "come and
| get it", "it" being the full data object instead of just
| getting a delta. It could have been called a whole slew of
| other things that would make more sense.
| dkersten wrote:
| Me too. Professional code isn't the right place to insert
| your personality or sense of humour.
| outime wrote:
| It's even worse when you stumble upon a repo with already
| poor documentation, only to find it filled with silly jokes
| e.g. "You thought this would be easy, right? Well, that's
| what X thought too, but..." yeah, leave the storytelling
| aside please.
| bmitc wrote:
| I am in this camp as well. Even worse are cute error
| messages.
|
| If software actually worked, then I'd be fine with more
| whimsy. But it doesn't, so I'm not.
| doright wrote:
| I remember when the Steam "login from a new computer" auth
| flow shoved a big "Hi there!" in user's faces the moment it
| blocked access to their entire online functionality until
| they left to get a code from their email and came back.
| Sometime later they removed it and now it's just "please
| look for the confirmation code sent to <address>".
|
| I think in the push to make computing "friendlier" by
| dressing up error messages, past a certain point they began
| to come off as condescending. I wish modern UX could focus
| on working for me instead of trying to be my friend all the
| time.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| I've noticed that modern life is in general less fun than it
| was 10 years ago. It might be me getting older, but I'm sure
| there are bigger societal changes too. BTW I used to browse
| tcrf.net and it was so interesting that video game developers
| would leave pieces of themselves in their work. Love letters,
| old memes, angry letters, random shit, whatever. Meanwhile
| modern programming is all about pRoFeSsIoAnALisM and MaXiMiZiNg
| PrOdUcTiViTy at all costs.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| Yes, it like a rite of passage from a startup to "mature"
| company. It's like Google's or Reddit's April Fools jokes.
| Actually, the novelty of April fools jokes can probably be a
| KPI of how corporatized a company is.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > BTW I used to browse tcrf.net and it was so interesting
| that video game developers would leave pieces of themselves
| in their work. Love letters, old memes, angry letters, random
| shit, whatever.
|
| This is quite dependent on the games you play. Modern games
| are becoming larger, which makes the project overall more
| serious and makes it harder to hide easter eggs. That being
| said, Indie games with small teams still contain a lot of fun
| and even AAAs can still contain some goodies.
| saidinesh5 wrote:
| I think it really is up to us to make things as fun as we
| want to see... There may be more minefields as we grow old
| (Can a senior pull a harmless prank on newly joined juniors
| without coming off as mean/threatening?), but at the same
| time these little joke comments/commit messages, pranks etc..
| are what brought people closer together in every place I
| worked at so far...
|
| I mean what other choice do we really have? let the fun
| police win?
| rendaw wrote:
| If you're 10 hours into debugging something, or you're swamped
| with a horde of bug reports and bad reviews, and after digging
| in you find the bug is in upstream code laced with humor, it
| comes off as if upstream isn't serious about software
| development or is making light of the responsibility. Lots of
| things start small, but X11, Android, etc etc are now used by
| millions, in lots of different situations, and humor is highly
| contextual.
| kube-system wrote:
| > humor is highly contextual.
|
| This is key. Writing jokes is easy, but it is much harder to
| guarantee that your joke is only displayed in appropriate
| contexts in the future. When what the author _thought_ was a
| witty joke shows up in a new and inappropriate context, they
| no longer look very witty, but instead like a fool. What is
| funny in developer documentation on a normal Tuesday might
| not be funny in a negative article on the front page of the
| Wall Street Journal.
| lawgimenez wrote:
| How isUserAMonkey API came about:
| https://books.google.nl/books?id=68BZEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA96&lpg=PA...
| znpy wrote:
| "image not available"
| riffraff wrote:
| that's because you're not a monkey
| rompic wrote:
| To ensure that the monkey of a monkey test (an emulated user
| doing random taps) cannot do all possible actions.
|
| https://books.google.nl/books?id=68BZEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA96&lpg=PA...
| "Bruce grew the lab over the years from an initial set of seven
| devices to more
|
| than 400. He said there were some unanticipated problems to
| resolve over that time. "One day I walked into the monkey lab
| to hear a voice say, '911-What's your emergency?" That
| situation resulted in Dianne adding a new function to the API,
| isUserAMonkey(), which is used to gate actions that monkeys
| shouldn't take during tests (including dialing the phone and
| resetting the device)."
| fredoralive wrote:
| Interestingly, the original Mac had a similar MonkeyLives flag:
| https://folklore.org/Monkey_Lives.html
| ROllerozxa wrote:
| I assume that's the "The Monkey" testing tool for the
| original Mac that's mentioned in the footnotes in the
| Androids book. Supposedly goes back to the infinite monkey
| theorem that makes monkeys act as a metaphor for randomness,
| and it was also mentioned that one of the developers of
| Android had used the same kind of monkey testing for WebTV
| and Palm OS.
| agildehaus wrote:
| Reminds me of BeOS (and now Haiku), which have "is_computer_on()"
| and "is_computer_on_fire()" both with great descriptions.
|
| https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/bebook/TheKernelKit_Sys...
| yomimiva wrote:
| For the curious minds:
| https://github.com/haiku/haiku/blob/master/src/system/libroo...
| tomn wrote:
| looking around a bit, it's used as an example in the
| documentation:
|
| https://github.com/haiku/haiku/blob/7d07c4bc739dbf90159a5c02.
| ..
|
| This is actually a great reason to keep it around; it's as
| simple as possible, and nothing uses it so it's easy to find
| the relevant bits of code.
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| Makes sense:
|
| is_computer_on() int32 is_computer_on(); Returns 1 if the
| computer is on. If the computer isn't on, the value returned
| by this function is undefined.
| throw74848484 wrote:
| I know it is trying to be funny. But those states are quite
| normal in modern computer with advanced power management. OS
| should handle wakeups from deep sleep, or state where
| temperature of motherboard is 200 celsius.
| mordae wrote:
| Unlikely. Nothing is specced beyond 140 Celsius and many
| parts not beyond 80.
| kxndnddn wrote:
| That statement is far too general and also factually wrong
| e.g. HT83C51 is specced for operating temperatures of 225
| deg Celsius
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| That's still not a chip where an OS would have to handle
| motherboard temperatures of 200C, like the original point
| though. An 8051 is going to be running bare metal. TI has
| some stuff in the C2000 line that can run FreeRTOS at
| 200C, but the overwhelmingly vast majority of chips on
| the market are rated to 150C max.
| vintagedave wrote:
| Reminds me of Delphi -- it has an exception
| 'EProgrammerNotFound'.
|
| https://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/Athens/en/System.S...
|
| With a completely serious (though short) documentation page I
| read as very, very dry humour.
| rkagerer wrote:
| The latter missed a golden opportunity to be some kind of async
| event-based trigger.
| gyomu wrote:
| Is there anything similar in the public iOS API?
| theletterf wrote:
| This means jokes and humour in technical documentation. While
| it's often frowned upon, I love a bit of humour in docs. I wrote
| about this here:
|
| https://passo.uno/experiment-humour-documentation/
| Aransentin wrote:
| For X11, from the top of my head:
|
| The global variable that toggles a bunch of legacy cruft is
| called "party_like_its_1989":
| https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/blob/master/di...
|
| The changelog for the DRI2 extension is "Awesomeness!", "True
| excellence", "Enlightenment attained" etc:
| https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.7/doc/dri2proto/dri2proto.t...
| bertil wrote:
| The `<blink>` tag was an official part of early HTML standard,
| until teenagers showed up online and sanity prevailed. I suspect
| this could have been there to maintain compatibility with older
| webpages.
| fredoralive wrote:
| This blink is in a specific UI XML dialect, not HTML.
| ninjaoxygen wrote:
| True, it has never been in an HTML standard, however it was
| definitely a documented part of early HTML.
|
| The blink element was in Netscape Navigator's HTML dialect in
| 1993/94, when early HTML was still just hitting IETF RFCs /
| DRAFTs, you can find blink in the Netscape HTML developer
| documentation from just after that era, DevEdge. It was never
| in NCSA Mosaic, the other big GUI browser of the era.
|
| Later on in the process of being standardized, when it was
| more W3C than IETF albeit still mainly the same people,
| Netscape agreed to drop blink from the proposals if Microsoft
| dropped marquee, so in that sense yes, it was never in a
| standardized version of HTML, but many tags in active use at
| the time were never in a standards doc.
|
| See here https://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/book4/ch02.html
| for some history from w3c, who went on to become the formal
| custodians of HTML after the IETF days.
|
| Edit: here's the earliest Netscape Developer Docs I can see
| on archive.org https://web.archive.org/web/19961115043739/htt
| p://developer....
| ROllerozxa wrote:
| Yeah that's where the concept of the blink tag originates, the
| now deprecated HTML tag. But what's covered in the blog post
| refers specifically to a hidden (and AFAIK undocumented) blink
| tag that exists in the Android XML layout view system, which is
| an independent thing from the system WebView browser (that I
| assume probably still contains some code for blink tags, but
| that wouldn't be a surprising discovery). I don't know if there
| are any other built-in tags in Android views that really map to
| HTML tags otherwise.
| tuveson wrote:
| It actually seems like there's another Easter egg if you google
| "blink tag": https://www.google.com/search?q=blink+tag
|
| (Doesn't seem to trigger on iOS, but works in Chrome and
| Firefox on desktop)
| uncircle wrote:
| public static final String DISALLOW_FUN
|
| _The default value is false. [...] Type: Boolean [...] Constant
| Value: "no_fun" _
|
| Source:
| https://developer.android.com/reference/android/os/UserManag...
|
| ---
|
| How the hell did this pass code review? Are booleans strings on
| Android?
| objclxt wrote:
| > How the hell did this pass code review? Are booleans strings
| on Android?
|
| You are misreading the documentation, it's a key/value API.
|
| `DISALLOW_FUN` is the string key you pass to
| `setUserRestriction`, which takes a boolean value.
| uncircle wrote:
| That makes more sense. Thanks.
| izacus wrote:
| Also this is an enterprise policy constant, so it gets sent
| (and configured) as string/string dictionary via REST API
| from MDM backend. That's mostly because the constants can
| be of mixed types (e.g. "MAX_PASSWORD_CHARS" : "1",
| "DISALLOW_NETWORK_SWITCHING: "true" - example, constants
| not actual).
| stevepotter wrote:
| Someone else pointed out the reason for the datatype. A more
| subtle problem is the use of double negatives. Boolean APIs
| like "disable" will throw off users of your API.
| yoko888 wrote:
| I like that this sense of humor is still preserved in such a huge
| company code base. You won't notice it when you use the API, but
| when you look at the source code, these little Easter eggs will
| remind you that there are real people behind the code. Compared
| with the cold feeling of many software nowadays, this contrast
| makes people feel warm. Honestly, maybe we need more of this.
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| Exactly what I thought, this help reminding that there are
| (were) actual humans behind any random piece of code or api I
| use.
| coxley wrote:
| For many years at FB, suffixing dangerous or really-deprecated
| tokens with `_DO_NOT_USE_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED` was the standard.
| Everyone[^1] was in on the joke.
|
| In the middle of the pandemic when ~50% of the workforce had
| started post-2020, it and other things became complaints for
| causing fear/uncertainty. We didn't do the best job on-boarding
| remote people and making them feel part of the culture at that
| time.
|
| [^1]: It was a big company so this statement could only be true
| in the circles I had access to.
| otras wrote:
| I remember seeing this in React's
| __SECRET_INTERNALS_DO_NOT_USE_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED, and I've
| always enjoyed similar lighthearted and unwieldingly-long
| names.
|
| Unfortunately I see it too has fallen victim to
| defunnification: https://github.com/facebook/react/pull/28789
| shkkmo wrote:
| Fun names are OK, but only if they don't introduce ambiguity.
| In this case the change wasn't so much anti-fun as anti-
| ambiguity.
| otras wrote:
| That's a great call-out, and it (along with the change
| itself) underlines the importance of not letting fun get in
| the way of actual engineering improvements. Defunnification
| as a side effect, if you will.
| serial_dev wrote:
| That variable name is still confusing.
| furyofantares wrote:
| Could have added a futurama reference to it
|
| __SECRET_INTERNALS_DO_NOT_USE_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED_______OUT_
| OF_A_CANNON___INTO_THE_SUN
| beder wrote:
| At one point at Google, there was a huge chunk of code that was
| hard to understand, probably at the wrong place in the network
| stack, and stubbornly hard to change. And it kept growing,
| despite our efforts. We renamed it "[Foo]Sorcery" (this was
| about 10 years ago); people stopped trying to add to it, and
| periodically someone would come in and remove parts of it, all
| thanks (I think) to the goofy (and somewhat scary) name.
| eej71 wrote:
| On OpenVMS, DCL (the shell and main scripting language of choice)
| had this as an exit code.
|
| $ exit 2928 %SYSTEM-W-FISH, my hovercraft is full of eels
| rfrey wrote:
| I want to make replying to this thread a requirement for anybody
| I'm interviewing to hire. Also for anybody interviewing me. Truly
| a "2 kinds of people in this world" moment.
| owebmaster wrote:
| Why? Googlers adding jokes to APIs is about as funny as dad
| jokes at Christmas dinner.
| rfrey wrote:
| So I know which of the 2 kinds of people in the world they
| are.
| khernandezrt wrote:
| The Androids: The Team that Built the Android Operating System:
| link isn't working :(
| ROllerozxa wrote:
| oops, no idea why the link I put there didn't work. Just
| corrected it, ended up linking to the page about the book on
| Chet Haase's website instead:
| https://www.chethaase.com/androids
| butz wrote:
| Looks like they finally set DISALLOW_FUN to true by default in
| latest Android release.
| lelandfe wrote:
| > _a hidden column in the Chrome task manager that shows how many
| goats a browser process has teleported_
|
| Was very dissatisfied to find this no longer works. Here's an old
| post with a screenshot:
| https://www.100-geek.net/articles/goats_teleported?action=ar...
|
| From 234 columns to 16, what a purge.
| paxys wrote:
| I miss the era of easter eggs in tech products. Kinda went away
| with the corporatization of everything.
| neuroelectron wrote:
| This is why I refuse to use android
| tetromino_ wrote:
| My favorite funny function in the Android source is
| android.os.Handler.runWithScissors() [1] - but (unfortunately) it
| is not part of the public API.
|
| [1]
| https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/...
| ROllerozxa wrote:
| > @hide This method is prone to abuse and should probably not
| be in the API. If we ever do make it part of the API, we might
| want to rename it to something less funny like runUnsafe().
|
| :D
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I was looking for this in TFA. Sad it wasn't included, as it's
| one of my favorites.
| b0a04gl wrote:
| these get into logs, metrics, API contracts. now you're
| explaining isUserAGoat() to a partner team in a quarterly review.
| nobody's laughing then
|
| funny thing is, linters catch unused vars but not unfunny ones.
| maybe we need a linter that flags joke names after 90 days. if
| it's still funny, you keep it. else rename and move on
| rkagerer wrote:
| "Our developers have a sense of humor. Next question."
| pugworthy wrote:
| Love the Lost (TV show) reference as well as the value of the
| constant.
|
| There is an additional Lost reference in
| https://developer.android.com/games/pgs/leaderboards
|
| Also
| https://developer.android.com/reference/android/service/auto...
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