"I’d forgotten to charge my headphones so Limp Bizkit started playing out of my laptop speakers. Fortunately no one else on the plane seemed to mind so we all rocked out together."
People like this lack basic civility. I'm sure a lot of the people around Robert did mind, they were just too polite to ask him to stop imposing his gratuitous noise on them.
Poe's law. This doesn't seem completely absurd because there are plenty of jerks on planes who don't dim excessively-bright screens much less reduce the volume of crap music.
What's the bar, though? If out of a million people reading a joke, 80% find it funny, 20% find it meh, and one solitary person needs the joke explained to them, I think it's still fair to call it a funny joke. There are multiple comments in this thread missing the satire so it's obvious the percentage is a bit higher than that, but I'd wager the majority of people didn't need the joke explained to them.
HN is not a representative sample of normal people and has a long understood inability to recognize satire, or even just particularly strong sarcasm. HN not getting a joke is not evidence of it being a bad joke.
I've never seen an online community fail to grasp sarcasm as badly as HN. I deliberately make one out of 50 posts ultra-sarcastic (to the point where no normal person could possibly believe I'd hold whatever view I wrote), and they always, always go straight to -4.
I read this as a joke. (Which I thought was funny precisely because so many people do lack this kind of basic civility—but I'm pretty sure not the author?)
While I didn't find the joke funny, it does thematically match the piece - the hacker who supposedly see the possibility to get free internet as a viable opportunity. Later in the piece the author does distance himself from that image, revealing the tone in the opening was merely a stylistic choice, a writer's device, as clearly he is not the kind of a person who will in practice exploit the airline systems.
For me it was 50/50. 50% it was a joke. 50% the guy was "one of those a-holes". They exist so it's hard to tell.
They aren't always American as some other commenters have pointed out. Was on a tour bus from Paris to Giverny and some Italian guy thought it was okay to watch his sport events out loud the entire way. Had a similar experience on a long distance train in Germany and another in a train in Japan (western person, not American). It's crazy to me people don't get how annoying it is. I'm sure they'd be annoying if I pulled out something louder but it apparently never occurs to them.
I did not read it as a joke. Granted,I'm not American and English is not my first language.
In a way it made me think "wow, it had to be an American who doesn't care about others than him and is rude and self centered"
Which is stupid a stupid generalization I know. And also goes to show the ambiguity of written language. And how strong our preconceptions can impact our judgement (as it did mine initially).
The dry sarcastic humor of the author made it very obvious to me that this was satire. I have a very similar sense of humor, at least partly. And I'm a native American English speaker.
Giveaways:
>I logged in to my JetStreamers Diamond Altitude account and started clicking.
Satire! It's not called that, but it's a similar marketing wankery version.
>This clickable rascal would allow me to access the entire internet through my airmiles account. This would be slow. It would be unbelievably stupid. But it would work.
"It would be unbelievably stupid but I'm going to do it anyway!"
>Several co-workers were asking me to review their PRs because my feedback was “two weeks late” and “blocking a critical deployment.” But my ideas are important too so I put on my headphones and smashed on some focus tunes.
Even this was a sarcastic/satirical leadup.
>I’d forgotten to charge my headphones so Limp Bizkit started playing out of my laptop speakers. Fortunately no one else on the plane seemed to mind so we all rocked out together.
Limp Bizkit is a very famous (or infamous) band that gets notoroiusly mocked. The odds of even a single person rocking out with that playing out of laptop speakers is tiny. Two people? Everyone on the plane? 0.0% chance.
I don't know why I put so much effort into explaining this.
People like this lack basic civility. I'm sure a lot of the people around Robert did mind, they were just too polite to ask him to stop imposing his gratuitous noise on them.