It is the go-to funny, accessible explanation of why you should never implement datetime handling yourself, linked in nearly every timezone thread.
Topics › Software Engineering & Languages
The best software (other) videos, according to Hacker News
36 videos about software (other) that Hacker News commenters keep pointing each other to, ranked by how many separate months they were recommended. Part of Software Engineering & Languages.
HN recommends it as an entertaining, well-delivered talk full of stories that shows the value of historical context and long comments in code.
HN commenters call it an internet classic that makes you a more proficient Excel user, and note it is still relevant despite predating newer functions like XLOOKUP.
HN commenters point to it whenever Excel, spreadsheets or functional programming come up, as a fun and serious take on spreadsheets as real programming.
HN commenters strongly recommend it as a fun alt-history of the web and bring it up whenever people muse about how the web could have been different.
HN people recommend it as an entertaining, surprisingly deep talk that comes up whenever encodings, mojibake or Unicode are discussed.
HN recommends it as an entertaining and eye-opening look at the irrational psychology behind language preferences, though some note it is not scientifically precise.
HN commenters recommend it as a fun, short talk that shows how HDR photography actually works through an absurdly playful implementation.
HN points to it whenever someone underestimates how hard email parsing, validation or building a mail client really is.
HN recommends it as an approachable start-here demo for people new to Obsidian.
Praised as painfully accurate office satire, with the channel's sketches called genius.
HN calls it a superb, funny and engaging talk, and links it often after Armstrong's death as one of his best.
Shared as developer humor, with commenters insisting any Dylan Beattie mention must come with this song.
Linked in licensing threads as a short, funny story about the 'no evil' clause and IBM's request for an exception.
Pointed to as the standard introduction to SILE as a modern TeX alternative, though possibly dated.
HN mostly drops it as a joke in async, Node and concurrency threads, and some call it hysterically funny.
The standard reference whenever HN discusses the Xerox scanner bug or AI and compression that fabricates content.
Cited as the origin of react-armor style DOM obfuscation, and as a favourite short talk from the conference.
HN points to it as a real-world example of Julia used in safety-critical aerospace design.
Shared as obligatory humor in FFmpeg and video tooling threads, praised as a funny take on the open source user experience.
The standard illustration of yak shaving, dependency hell and getting derailed, also likened to adult ADHD.
HN uses it as shorthand for how hard it is to write unambiguous instructions, in discussions of programming, tutorials and LLM prompting.
HN links it whenever IDs, base64 or random identifier space come up, as a short and pleasant explainer.
HN links it with timestamps as an early, hands-on demo of control theory and as a curiosity from Davis's work.
Used as a joke reference whenever the cool-kids-use-X trope comes up in technology threads.
Cited as the fun, surprising example of how much a PDF can do, and the talk behind the Horrifying PDF Experiments repo.
HN links it as a joke in threads about Dijkstra's writings, not as a recommendation.
Posted as a joke whenever threads discuss impossible or contradictory specifications and clients, to show a clever solution exists.
Cited as a nostalgic example of a CLI that orders pizza whenever HN discusses terminal-based ordering.
Cited as the official explanation of Google's scoped storage changes and its intent to limit broad file access.
It is posted as an in-joke whenever Java GUI layout, Swing or desktop UI toolkits come up.
HN shares it as a relatable, funny song when threads turn to the struggle of finishing side projects.
HN cites it as an example of messy code behind successful games and of the human stories that code comments can hold.
Posted as a joke or obligatory sketch in threads about Excel, Microsoft products and tech layoffs.
Linked whenever email validation comes up as a fun illustration of how deceptively difficult it is.
Posted as a joke or shorthand whenever a thread touches microservices, architecture sprawl, naming, or talking to management.
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