Interesting; tomorrow I'm going to ask five people this exact question just to see what happens.
EDIT: Obviously if you've read the article, it states this is like asking "do you know what time it is?" - that is it's an known excuse to start a conversation. Personally, I don't believe this, hence my experiment.
Can someone please explain (or point out a link to the rules in question) why is this post getting downvoted? I understand the parent comment is not very informative, but this one I found quite helpful as I had forgotten the quote in question and it is relevant to the "wi-fi password discussion" the grandparent has started.
Additionally I would simply love a bot like that going around explaining popular media quotes. I frequent the SpaceX subreddit and they have one explaining space related acronyms whenever any are found in the discussion. Makes reading it a lot more pleasant.
I think there's a HN cultural preference to avoid stream-of-consciousness tangents, so even clever or informative -- but off-topic -- replies to such tangents tend to suffer.
IMO this is the source of some people's impression that humour isn't welcome here. My experience is the opposite - on-topic (and funny) comments do well even if only a joke or quip, but off-topic humour sinks, even if clever and civil.
I'm quite lowbrow and really enjoy the more clever comment chains on Reddit, but I also appreciate the HN alternative, where attempts at pun chains, etc. sink to the bottom and on-topic thoughts rise.
If you really wanted to find out about the quote, it's just a google search away. For everyone else, it's useless pop culture trivia obscuring real content.
(The right way to do this would be to add a feature to the HN/reddit forum software that allows unobtrusive footnotes to comments. Acronyms could just be auto-hyperlinked (with short definition in the alt text) in the original comment.)
Interesting; tomorrow I'm going to ask five people this exact question just to see what happens.
EDIT: Obviously if you've read the article, it states this is like asking "do you know what time it is?" - that is it's an known excuse to start a conversation. Personally, I don't believe this, hence my experiment.