Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API

voxelmanip.se

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 172 posts

Re: Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API

#101

Post by potatolicious »

notpushkin wrote: post #87
joshstrange wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When you’re building an API, it is your product.

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.

Re: Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API

#103

Post by kxndnddn »

mordae wrote: post #42
throw74848484 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unlikely. Nothing is specced beyond 140 Celsius and many parts not beyond 80.

That statement is far too general and also factually wrong e.g. HT83C51 is specced for operating temperatures of 225 deg Celsius

Re: Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API

#105

Post by sumtechguy »

izacus wrote: post #68
girvo wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

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" c…

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.

Re: Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API

#106

Post by filoleg »

dylan604 wrote: post #2

How is someone writing an article about Android source code node nerdy enough to know what a Tricoder is? I don’t buy it

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”.

Re: Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API

#107

Post by otras »

coxley wrote: post #90

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]…

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

Re: Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API

#108

Post by rendaw »

londons_explore wrote: post #8

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.

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.

Re: Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API

#109

Post by owebmaster »

rfrey wrote: post #98

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.

Why? Googlers adding jokes to APIs is about as funny as dad jokes at Christmas dinner.

Re: Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API

#110

Post by ROllerozxa »

perching_aix wrote: post #13
dylan604 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 weari…

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.

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).

Post reply on HN