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Frame from Medieval helpdesk with English subtitles Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

Medieval helpdesk with English subtitles

NRK
Comedy
YouTube
Cited on HN 5 times, 2009–2024, never outright recommended score 0
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN drops it as a joke whenever threads touch on new interfaces, books or technology confusing users.

A classic Norwegian TV comedy sketch from NRK's show Oystein og jeg, subtitled in English, in which a monk calls a helpdesk to learn how to use a book instead of a scroll.

1 critical · 4 jokes · Comedy

5 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@pclark Apr 2009 Pushes back
on HN thread Twi.bz: the transparent URL shortener
thats a remarkable service. They take this ugly url: [this video] [38 characters] and turn it into this pretty url: [link] [47 characters] their "pretty" url is much longer than the original one. What the hell!?
@stan_rogers Jun 2011 Makes a joke
on HN thread When hard books disappear
I'm on the "dead trees or their equivalent forever" side myself (search doesn't work well with paraphrases, and the physical book has more physical cues for random retrieval of imperfectly remembered passages), but "the 'flip pages with your finger' UI has proved immensely durable" requires a link to this classic clip from Øystein og jeg : [this video]
@kstenerud Nov 2011 Makes a joke
on HN thread Scrollbars: Why is Apple eradicating a linchpin of user interface design?
Read more
Pages were superior because: 1. Scrolls were more difficult to handle as you read. 2. You could jump around to various places in a long book document, but with a scroll you had to manually unravel it to the point you were looking for, a time consuming process. 3. Books were not without their difficulties, however: [this video] But in all seriousness, the scroll concept works perfectly well, in fact better than the book concept, provided you have the right technology to drive it. And modern computers have that technology. I can use a search box to jump to wherever I want. I can quickly scroll up and down in the document using a scroll bar rather than paging through a book.
@RecycledEle Feb 2024 Makes a joke
on HN thread I don't want anything your AI generates
When Gutenberg asked people what they thought of his printing press, they replied that it lacked the soul of a hand-copied book and they would never buy a book printed on it. Also relevant: [this video]

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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