The hackers guide to the hackernews front page

Humorous article, completely unrelated to, and written before, the others ended up actually on the front page.

The Goal:

• To get a post on the front page of the infamous Orange site…

The Plan:

• There are four guaranteed strategies. No one knows why they work, but you may pick one, give it a shot, and tell me I’m wrong.

Option 1:

• Put RISC-V in the title.

That’s it. I don’t care what else the title says, it could be announcing that you have the rear bumper of a 1971 Chevette for sale, that shit is on a rocket-ship straight to number 1.

Option 2:

• Go to wikipedia.com, to the ‘search’ bar, and proceed to allow your cat to walk across on your keyboard several times back and forth..

  Do this until some semblance of an english word or phrase appears in the text-box, then press the Search button. Now, you may need to do this multiple times because the first initial results might not be odd or eccentric enough.

  Perhaps try your other cat, or if you do not have another cat in your household, go find a neighborhood cat, and entice him/her/they to traverse your keyboard.

I have heard that dvorak keyboards may be superior for this, although I must admit I heard it from an Uber driver so I’m not going to risk my internet reputation and tell all of you like it’s a fact.. It’s not like I read it on wikipedia article*. We will have to ask ThePrimeagen to confirm this.

The best way to provoke this behavior from cats, is to appear to the cat, that you are in an important ‘zoom’ meeting, or are otherwise occupied on your computer doing some task that would be greatly impeded by said feline should they decide to go for a stroll down qwerty-lane.

You will know when the search results are right, because the topic will be so obscure, that you will sit back in awe of who could possibly have thought that this information was relevant or important to anyone else, while still sounding like something that, if someone told you Columbia university pays 14 million dollars a year in grant money to research, you wouldn’t second guess it.

Option 3:

• Link to an Open source project/technology that is old enough at this point that you might even consider leaving it off your resume, but not so old that it gets caught up with the hundreds of posts every day that simply link to the clearly still-maintained website of some ancient technology from 1962; that somehow looks like the website too, was designed in the same time period, in preparation for the eventual release of the internet.

Some suggestions:

Blosxom (I shit you not, as I was google’ing for this,

Zope

CoffeeScript

XHTML

Apache Tomcat

Option 4:

• ShowHN: Build something in the upper left corner of a chart where complexity and difficulty is the Y axis and real-world usefulness is its X.

Some recommendations are:

• A common-lisp to vimscript-8 transpiler.

• Rewrite any of the coreutils in Javascript.

• A web framework in APL (or your choice of array language).

• Implement (at least some part of) the JVM in a scripting language

• Implement either Flappy Bird or Conways game of life in your choice of:

  • GNU Sed, Bash, elisp, etc. Just ask yourself, if Richard Stallman was going to implement flappy bird…

  • The Typescript Typesystem

  • Inside a computer you build inside a video-game (minecraft, etc)

  • Dreamberd

*You know, that for just a moment… you believed that it was a real article..

Thanks for reading this, I had a laugh writing it.

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