You don't have to read every story on HN. Maybe in future you could avoid any obviously unserious ones. The word "buttocks" in the title is a good hint of what to expect.
Other discussion sites that have a "vote to the top" system similar to Hacker News usually get _flooded_ with low effort humor posts, to the point where it's hard to find any actual interesting comments on the subject. It's not difficult to see why - it's a lot easier to make a small comment with a pun than a longer thought out comment (so output is greater), it's a lot faster as well (the fastest comments are the most likely to stick to the top), and it's a lot easier to vote for your comment. Someone reads something for five seconds, smirks, and gives an upvote, instead of deciding whether or not to spend a couple of minutes reading a comment and thinking about whether or not the agree with the point being made.
Interestingly, this never seemed to be a big deal with the old forums. The upvote system seems to really encourage a certain type of behavior (small low effort comments that lack substance).
You are really tempting me to write a long thought-out comment about how to draw a pair of buttocks, with lots of citations and quotes and code samples and a good dose of gratuitous partial differential equations needed to meet the paper quota for impressive formulas. [1]
Butfirst [2] I will refer you to my previous long thought-out comment about Sun Microsystem's dress code, the practice of "Skinnyhacking" [3] pioneered down the road at SGI [4], and the full names of the nude hackers involved [5], as well as a citation to the 1992 SIGGRAPH proceedings, and a link to a pdf of the paper [6] including a photograph of the Skinnyhackers in all their glory:
"Fast Shadows and Lighting Effects Using Texture Mapping", by Mark Segal, Carl Korobkin, Rolf van Widenfelt, Jim Foran, Paul Haeberli, Silicon Graphics Computer Systems. Computer Graphics, 26, 2, July 1992, Page 252, Figure 3: Simulating a Slide Projector.
I am admittedly old, but when the hell did tech folk get so goddamned serious that ass/fart jokes and lame puns became such objects of derision and not badges of honor among us? This post epitomizes creative problem solving and creative butt jokes
Once upon a time we ruled this world…now we have become that disapproving aunt who thinks the world is going to hell because Johnny Carson let George Carlin talk about bad words on his show.
Certainly wit, sarcasm, and satire are all welcome contextually. The criticism is obviously on facile low-effort puns and juvenile butt-joke humor which are welcome on 100% of every social media platform I'm aware of.
