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Node.js Is Bad Ass Rock Star Tech

4 videos recommended on HN
YouTube
2 HN users recommended this comedy video2 months2012–2026 score 2
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN mostly drops it as a joke in async, Node and concurrency threads, and some call it hysterically funny.

A short satirical sketch in which a Q&A about web servers turns into a profane rant about threads, blocking and non-blocking I/O. It lampoons the hype around Node.js and async programming.

“Watch the very NSFW (lots of swearing) but hysterically funny video” (HN, 2021)

2 recommendations · 3 citations · 15 jokes · Comedy

20 Hacker News comments

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

@throwaway81523 Oct 2021 Recommends
on HN thread A viable solution for Python concurrency
> What specifically is the problem with asyncio? Watch the very NSFW (lots of swearing) but hysterically funny video "node.js is bad ass rock star tech" on youtube sometime ;). [this video]
Very NSFW but hysterically funny async satire

Citations, criticism and jokes

@batista May 2012 Cites it
on HN thread Vert.x (JVM async) vs Node.js Http benchmarks results
Read more
>We know the java libraries are there for lots of things, but Node is all about async and handling thousands of connections. It does this by forcing the entire ecosystem to be async too (including things like database drivers). By using a Java JDBC database driver you're completely losing any async support. Same presumably goes for redis or Mongo drivers. You can do some of the work with threads and pooling, but it's still not the same, and makes this another useless micro benchmark. Sounds like you're quoting from the "Node.js Is Bad Ass Rock Star Tech" satire video ( [this video] ). Nothing inherently special about "forcing the entire ecosystem to be async too", especially since Node is more or less FORCED to do that, because javascript is single threaded. Add the bad callback spaghetti implementation of async, and the main benefit of Node is easy deployment, and accessibility to the millions of javascript programmers. As an async environment it doesn't offer anything either new or too compelling.
@angersock Nov 2013 Cites it
on HN thread Node.js is Cancer (2011)
Folks, why are you upvoting this? It only talks about CPU usage, Node not being Unixy enough, and Javascript being terrible. A better critique would have included talks about callback hell, or the general philosophical issues of non-block/evented work versus synchronous programming: see the classic [this video] . This isn't even that great a rant. (I appreciate my fellow Rails devs probably upvoting it out of spite, but c'mon...)
Classic critique of callback hell and evented programming
@groundzeros2015 May 2026 Cites it
on HN thread Async Rust never left the MVP state
I disagree with the premise. I cannot imagine a better latency experience than blocking loop IDEs like VS6. Which inputs are getting latency? The keyboard? The files? > the non blocking nature [this video]
Cited in an argument about blocking versus non-blocking
@eip May 2013 Makes a joke
on HN thread Understanding Vert.x Architecture - Part II | CUBRID Blog
Read more
"I don't know much about Spring, but In Vert.x 1.x each Verticle that is deployed has its own classloader, so it's hard to share a context across verticles." -- Tim Fox (Vertx creator) "A vert.x instance guarantees that a particular verticle instance is always executed by the exact same thread. This gives you a huge advantage as a developer, since you can program all your code as single threaded. Well, that won't be a big deal to you if you are coming from JavaScript where everything is single threaded, but if you're used to multi-threaded programming in Java, Scala, or even Ruby, this may come as a huge relief" -- lol [this video]
@brokenparser Apr 2014 Makes a joke
on HN thread 4chan source code leaked (2010)
Luckily, Javascript is always allowed in PHP projects and it can do a lot more today than it could a decade ago. Also, using it will often lead to having NodeJS on the server even if it's just for compiling assets initially. And NodeJS is bad ass rock star tech: [this video]
@eip May 2014 Makes a joke
on HN thread An Opinionated Guide to Modern Java, Part 3: Web Development
You're most welcome. > try writing anything in Node.js without a callback! I wouldn't even try writing anything in Node. Server side javascript is not an option I would consider. [this video] Hazelcast on it's own is pretty useful if you need a distributed data grid in Java although it's not without its quirks. Unfortunately it's much less useful in Vertx because of the classloaders. Callbacks as an antipattern is one of the main points of this HN post.
@peteretep Feb 2015 Makes a joke
on HN thread The Rewards of Creating a Programming Language
It's remarkably difficult to find anything approaching hard numbers :-) However, I am going off: * [link] (Haskell slightly ahead in their numeric ranking) * [link] (Golang slightly ahead in their ranking) * Slightly more published books on Haskell that I can find (although obviously it's been around a lot longer) I have no doubt that Go will eventually surpass Haskell in terms of popularity, and may even have a slight edge, but suggesting that Go popularized typeclasses smacks of fanboyism, and reminds me - in no small measure - of: [this video]
@davidw Dec 2016 Makes a joke
on HN thread Comparing Haskell and Node concurrency performance
> Node ... popularized the event-loop Tcl was doing event loops quite successfully in the late 90ies and was fairly popular, back in the day. These days, I'd use Erlang (Elixir). This is kind of ranty, but also makes me laugh: [this video]
@pdkl95 Jul 2017 Makes a joke
on HN thread Is Ruby Too Slow for Web-Scale?
"If you're willing to suffer complex code for performance, why not just write an nginx module in C?" "node.js is is the most bad-ass rock star tech to come out since Ruby On Rails" [this video] ... "What was that last part again? I could have sworn you just said Lisp" (Yes, performance and scalability are complicated. Different solutions will be appropriate for different situations.)
@kllrnohj Jul 2017 Makes a joke
on HN thread Metaclasses: Thoughts on generative C++
[this video] More seriously Node.js has some pretty major performance problems, like the fact that it's single threaded. You'll make excellent use of one core, but that's about it. It looks great on I/O bound request/second benchmarks, but as soon as your code needs to do meaningful work it doesn't scale anymore. The solution to that is to spawn multiple node instances to make use of the actual machine resources, but now you're on your own and why did you bother with node.js then in the first place?
@fzil Dec 2021 Makes a joke
on HN thread Consider SQLite
> Make it web scale. Oh god whenever I read/hear that it reminds of the ridiculously funny video about nodejs and Apache servers. [1] [1]. [this video]
@gustavus Oct 2023 Makes a joke
on HN thread Is POSIX really outdated?
That's funny. I was listening to this video ( [this video] ) Node.js is badass rockstar tech just barely, and one of the exact quotes is "Threads don't scale". I assumed it was just a joke, but here was see Poe's law in full effect.
@chao- Sep 2025 Makes a joke
on HN thread Cap'n Web: a new RPC system for browsers and web servers
Reminds me of the old "MongoDB is Web Scale" series of comedy videos: [this video] Some friends and I still jokingly troll each other in the vein of these, interjecting with "When async programming was discovered in 2008...", or "When memory safe compiled languages were invented in 2012..." and so forth.
@6510 Dec 2025 Makes a joke
on HN thread The Windows Utility
Little computer people was awesome[0]. Upscale it to a full size microsoft office[3]. Give agents neck bearded avatars with green hair named after real employees except from legal, there everyone is a pirate. Make it so that one can zoom in on everything and follow the cringe worthy dialog in overloaded sprint-planners that some~how work out. Take style pointers from KRAZAM Microservices[12] and gar1t's "Nodejs is bad ass rockstar tech"[44] [0] - [link] [3] - [link] [12] - [link] [44] - [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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