Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

The concept is brilliant and filled with potential, but like every other joke on Uncyclopedia the delivery is pretty disappointing.

For example, they set up an awesome joke here:

  uncyclopedia@uncyclo-laptop:~$ help

    --help   Displays actual help.

    --i question   Interactive version of actual help 
Then totally botch it with a lame juvenile punchline:

    --omgwtfbbq   Secret Feature 

  uncyclopedia@uncyclo-laptop:~$ help --help

  NO HELP FOR YOU N00B.


It was a strange mix of humorous and clever and 4chan-ish waste. The Xorg.conf-like entry for an LCD w/ five dead pixels was a highlight for me. It sort of mocked the slightly bygone era of having to know your syncs and refresh rates and hand-enter them amidst warnings that, in theory, being very wrong could destroy your perfectly normal monitor.


I think it's art and open to interpretation. To me, "--omgwftbbq" hints at the bazaar development, leading to inconsistency and unbridled enthusiasm about some features.


it should ideally be:

uncyclopedia@uncyclo-laptop:~$ help --help

Displays help about help.


Yeah, exactly. The help command should also have a dozen useless esoteric options but no obvious way to actually get any help. Here are some suggestions :)

  -B Don't not use non-buffered IO for not displaying output
  -e Pipe help output through rot13 transformation
  -G Display output in psychedelic ANSI format
  -w Produce ASCII histogram of help task heap allocations.
  -Z Format output so that the number of columns is a prime number
  -Q Run help in daemon mode
  -X1 Translate help to Klingon
  -X2 Translate help to Esperanto
  -X12 Translate help to Esperanto, then to Klingon
  -X21 Translate help to Klingon, then to Esperanto


that made me laugh more than the article itself




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: