<story><title>A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle</title><url>https://kiwiziti.com/~matt/timberlake/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pvg</author><text>The crucial detail that is a little buried in the piece is that the original &amp;#x27;explanation&amp;#x27; was posted in &amp;#x2F;r&amp;#x2F;ProgrammerHumor so it said right on the tin it was a joke. But the (seemingly clearly intended as a joke) details temporarily nerd-sniped a lot of people&amp;#x27;s senses of humor right out of their brains. The HN discussion discussion from back then is still fun reading with a number of commenters very invested in the notion that it wasn&amp;#x27;t really a joke.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=21566921&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=21566921&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>davesque</author><text>Just looked into this and yeah, the original post to which the comment was responding was a programmer humor post. However, it looked as if the comment in question &lt;i&gt;may&lt;/i&gt; have been an actual, legit attempt to explain the phenomenon. I don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s obvious or assumed that the comments responding to programmer humor posts are always intended to be jokes as well.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m also just asking myself what&amp;#x27;s more likely here. Think of the demographic of that forum. It seems to me like some up and coming nerd kid fancied themself an expert and cooked up a half baked theory about what was happening.</text></comment>
<story><title>A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle</title><url>https://kiwiziti.com/~matt/timberlake/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pvg</author><text>The crucial detail that is a little buried in the piece is that the original &amp;#x27;explanation&amp;#x27; was posted in &amp;#x2F;r&amp;#x2F;ProgrammerHumor so it said right on the tin it was a joke. But the (seemingly clearly intended as a joke) details temporarily nerd-sniped a lot of people&amp;#x27;s senses of humor right out of their brains. The HN discussion discussion from back then is still fun reading with a number of commenters very invested in the notion that it wasn&amp;#x27;t really a joke.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=21566921&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=21566921&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>causality0</author><text>If it was a &lt;i&gt;post&lt;/i&gt; in the subreddit that would make sense. But it was a comment, not a post, and thus not labeled as humor.</text></comment>