Ask HN: Software That Insults You?

A long time ago I got an account on an old Unix machine (Irix? HP?), my first, I'd heard that you could get help by typing "man", so did so. The response was

    Apropos what?

which I thought so snooty that I laughed out-loud, and everyone in the room looked at me as if I were some kind of nut.

  $ man
  What manual page do you want?
  For example, try 'man man'.

  $ apropos
  apropos what?

Have you seen the “sl” command?

Not sure if it qualifies, but I find humorous the mysql --i-am-a-dummy flag.

> Allow only those UPDATE and DELETE statements that specify which rows to modify by using key values.

    UPDATE whatever_table SET WHERE condition;

    DELETE FROM WHERE condition;

I’m insulted every time an app has one of those forced tutorials I have to click through.

https://gitlab.com/dwt1/bash-insulter like this?

Here is was hoping for a venue to vent my anger with how using Microsoft’s recent products around Office kind of insults any sane person using it.

OneDrive syncing away files, created on that very same machine just to be not available anymore while you are working on a business trip with sketchy network connections?

Word just outright freezing to death on trying to create a OneDrive link to the current file?

I used it for about 30 minutes years and years ago and didn’t really like it but Carrot Weather for iOS fits this bill. I believe it insults the user and generally uses snarky language. That’s pretty much its whole schtick, so it’s not really a hidden feature or easter egg. I don’t even know if it provides any more accurate weather information than other apps; I think people use it mostly for its ‘character’.

Again, not really my thing but it’s featured on the App Store a lot and has won numerous awards.

Does forced to use electron apps count as an insult?

Every time when an app throws me a “Are you sure you want to do xyz?” dialog.

Cleo[0] is a financial chatbot that roasts you for your spending among other things.

Example:

  12 trips to McDonalds this month
  Any more and I’ll start listing it as a bill

(Disclosure, I work for Cleo, and it's not open source, but you didn't specify that as a requirement)

[0] https://web.meetcleo.com

Windows 10/11 insults me regularly. My mistake seems to be installing it.

Yeah Google search does it all the time. I always type in specific phrases like "Who was XZY ?" and Google automatically assumes I wanted to search for XYZ and shows me result for XYZ. With a small link which asks "Search instead for who was XZY ?" Just show me exactly what I asked for google goddamnit.

MPW C compiler error messages: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jasonh/personal/humor/compile.html

    "a typedef name was a complete surprise to me at this point in your program"
    "'Volatile' and 'Register' are not miscible"
    "You can't modify a constant, float upstream, win an argument with the IRS, or satisfy this compiler"
    "This struct already has a perfectly good definition"
    "type in (cast) must be scalar; ANSI 3.3.4; page 39, lines 10-11 (I know you don't care, I'm just trying to annoy you)"
    "can't go mucking with a 'void *'"
    "we already did this function"
    "This label is the target of a goto from outside of the block containing this label AND this block has an automatic variable with an initializer AND your window wasn't wide enough to read this whole error message"
    "Too many errors on one line (make fewer)"
    "Symbol table full - fatal heap error; please go buy a RAM upgrade from your local Apple dealer"

Ski or Die, snowboard halfpipe: "I don't know you or your dog"

As a side-tool, there is the classic wowbagger:

https://www.wowbagger.com/manual6.htm

right now it is focused on Putin, however.

Running `feh` in an ssh session (or other terminal session without a graphical display) will print

    "Can't open X display. It *is* running, yeah?"

That's not quite an insult, but seems to be the in the same spirit

Apple Music. I can’t understand how you can develop such an slow and laggy app in your own OS, even in an iPhone 11 Pro. I stayed on Spotify but would have love to be able to enjoy the lossless audio

I find GitHub 404 page (“this is not the page you’re looking for”) insulting, as:

1. They suggest arriving at this address is my fault

2. They try to play Jedi mind tricks on me

The „proceed with slow shipping“ angle when ordering without amazon prime and similar.

Long ago a friend had an Atari 520ST computer, with a graphical interface. When it displayed an error dialog, you had to click on "Sorry" to continue. I remember being insulted but also amused by having to apologize.

This isn't what you asked for, but the insult and disrespect radiating from my Samsung device when it refuses to uninstall forced jankware... It fuels my conviction to train free and open source developers and built a world where humans are in charge again

Every forced UI animation is an insult, because its message is "I believe you are too stupid to remember the command you issued approximately 0 seconds ago, so sit and waste your time while I remind you."

And worse still are delays added solely to trick you into thinking the task requires more CPU time than it really does.

In FrameMaker's "Book" functionality, where you can stitch together a bunch of individual chapter files into a larger document, there's a very edge-case possibility of hitting a situation where there's no solution to the pagination (say that Chapter One has a forward reference to "(See page 57.xiv)" but added text puts the tagged info on page 57.xv, so the reference gets automatically changed to "(See page 57.xv)", but that text is shorter, so there's a slim chance that the reference has to change back to 57.xiv, but that makes the text longer again, which pushes the tagged info back to page 57.xv, ad infinitum).

Clearly, though it never happens in the real world, my code had to detect if a document seemed to be looping this way, and since I never expected anyone to see it, it just issued the one-word error message "Degenerate", with the intended meaning that "this document has hit a degenerate case".

Well, of course some customer found a bug that triggered the message, and called tech support, irate that our software had called him a degenerate.

Not sure if videogames count as they tend to contain a lot more snark by their nature, but I like how the easiest mode in the Wolfenstein series is called "Can I play, Daddy?".

golang (from pjmlp's comment here[0])

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"The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt. – Rob Pike 1"

"It must be familiar, roughly C-like. Programmers working at Google are early in their careers and are most familiar with procedural languages, particularly from the C family. The need to get programmers productive quickly in a new language means that the language cannot be too radical. – Rob Pike 2"

Sources:

https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Lang-NEXT/Lang-NEXT-2014/Pa...

https://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article

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[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30696562