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Comment by pastrami_panda | Hacker News Reader

I was hiking a summer when there was a 'lemming year'. You saw thousands of tiny carcasses strewn everywhere during that week, you accidently stepped on them as they ran under your hiking boots mid-step, if you sat down off trail they would start running up to you and attack. It was very surreal, they are very cute but also very fierce. Seeing a lemming run up to you and stand up on its hind legs and produce a high pitched shriek to intimidate you is something I'll never forget. Very strange animals.

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The comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38109510 has very similar content and is a few hours older than this one. Did you post the same thing under two usernames or something?

I didn't see it, but everyone who has hiked during a lemming year has these types of stories about these crazy animals

Edit: I read the comment you linked, the reason we have such similar language is because Swedes and Norwegians call it the same thing and I guess both of us were unsure if 'lemming year' is a widespread term :)

Belgian actually, but with Norwegian friends. :)

The writing styles seem sufficiently different to me. Also the accounts were both made years ago and years apart.

A much more likely and charitable interpretation of events is that 'lemming year' is an event that many people have experienced and the experience is sufficiently similar that you get accounts that sound the same.

I mean, if multiple people described christmas morning to me, my first thought wouldn't be that they're all in actuality the same person.

Here's another Scandinavian.. those "lemming years" as we called them used to be fairly common in the past, much more then than these days. They used to happen regularly every four years or so. I remember the summer of 1974 (I think it was), the roads were so slick with lemming carcasses that every early morning road maintenance crews would be out with machinery normally used for building/maintaining roads - I think the English term is "road grader". Roads were completely covered with blood and innards from lemmings. It was surreal.

I think the English term is "road grader"

Yup, these things:

https://www.cat.com/en_US/products/new/equipment/motor-grade...

Now, maybe you're thinking of something else, but a road grader would definitely do that grizzly job.

That's what they used, yes.

They really aren’t similar at all. Can you not be a Reddit and go around looking for things to accuse people of? Thanks.

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