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Comment by frisco | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of the "isUserAMonkey" thread: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7792123/strange-function-...

That turned out to refer to automated testing harnesses as opposed to live users (see: http://developer.android.com/tools/help/monkey.html). Unfortunately, http://developer.android.com/tools/help/goat.html 404s.

The Android API is known for lots of little hidden references and Google jokes. The SensorManager for example has a bunch (i.e., GRAVITY_DEATH_STAR_I and SENSOR_TRICORDER: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/hardware/Sens...).

According to the Chrome team, the "Goats Teleported" reference in Chrome is just a random number: http://www.quora.com/Google-Chrome/How-is-the-number-for-Goa...

So, it appears that isUserAGoat is most likely just an engineering joke that shipped.

"LIKE_TRANSACTION", "TWEET_TRANSACTION", on the lowlevel IBinder RPC interface in Android also made me laugh a bit: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/os/IBinder.ht... . "There is no response returned and nothing about the system will be functionally affected by it, but it will improve the app's self-esteem.".

The code responsible for enumerating goat teleportation (on very low contrast page): http://100-geek.net/articles/goats_teleported

kNuthMagicNumber?

Looks like golden ratio (phi, about 1.618) * 2^30. Maybe something to do with Knuth's Surreal Numbers? (http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/sn.html)

Maybe the answer to this question sheds some light on that: http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/9639/how-did-knu...

One thing this page noticed that I hadn't previously was the comment // See design doc at http://go/at-teleporter for more information.

I believe that's a Google intranet page, and so this story is left hanging for the non-Googlers among us.

Naming an automated GUI tester a monkey could be a reference to the original Mac: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Monkey_Lives.txt

(IIRC, the original Mac also had an area of memory called "MickeyBytes" that stored the current mouse acceleration settings)

Or it could be a Chinese Zodiac sign thing? There are 12 animals in the Chinese Zodiac, each representing a year in a 12 year cycle. Goat and Monkey are two of them. I'm a Tiger, which means I am either 2,14,26,38,50,62,74,86 or 98 years old.

Well, the number in chrome is kinda random (not really), but there is a story behind why someone added "goats teleported". That wasn't just randomly chosen, it's from a joke that dates back to 2006.

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