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Frame from Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up (Official Video) (4K Remaster) Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up (Official Video) (4K Remaster)

Rick Astley
Music
YouTube
Cited on HN 20 times, 2013–2023, never outright recommended score 0
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN mostly uses it as a Rickroll joke or as a stand-in test URL for tools handling YouTube links.

The official music video for Rick Astley's 1987 hit Never Gonna Give You Up, the song behind the Rickroll internet prank.

6 citations · 14 jokes · Music

20 Hacker News comments

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

@Khao Jul 2015 Cites it
on HN thread Linkmoji – Turn any link into Emoji
I tried linking to the rick roll video (just as a test url) and it breaks because it seems to lowercase everything. Original url : [this video] Linkmoji url : [link] After following the link : [link] And then you get a 404 not found
Used as a test URL that breaks Linkmoji
@TheAceOfHearts Jan 2017 Cites it
on HN thread IINA – A modern video player for macOS
Read more
I'm gonna be trying it out, since another commenter mentioned it's powered by mpv. Although, as I have very basic requirements, I'm already perfectly content with starting up mpv from the cli or by using mpv.app. If you try this out and feel like it's not what you're looking for, I'd suggest trying out mpv [0] directly. It integrates youtube-dl [1], so you can easily watch YouTube, as well as from the other hundreds of sources they support, very easily. For example: mpv [this video] The most recent macOS update brought a picture-in-picture feature, where you could keep videos playing on top of everything else in one side of the screen. With mpv you can get a close approximation by using the "--ontop" flag. Although admittedly it's not quite as nice as the new built-in feature. And a bit tangential to the whole thing, I found mpv's C API [2] to be very approachable and well documented. [0] [link] [1] [link] [2] [link]
Example URL for playing YouTube via mpv
@vortico Sep 2017 Cites it
on HN thread The End of ProTube 2
Yes, he's at the mercy of YouTube since he's building on the platform in violation of its ToS. But as a consumer, you can use the youtube-dl script ( [link] ) along with mpv ( [link] ) to play YouTube videos as you wish. Example: mpv [this video] mpv --no-video [this video] mpv <pretty much any video / streaming site in existence> Both packages are available in your nearest package manager, i.e. brew for MacOS, MSYS2 for Windows, etc.
Example URL for mpv playback
@chrismorgan Sep 2022 Cites it
on HN thread YouTubePluginReplacement.cpp: YouTube-specific code in WebKit
Read more
I believe this is about allowing this kind of markup (that exists on old web pages that haven’t been updated for a long time) to still work: <embed [this video] … by roughly translating it into <iframe [this video] Probably also the <object> equivalent, maybe only that and not <embed>, I’m not sure. I never had a great deal to do with those two tags. I don’t know why it has to be done this way. I’d have thought that without this extra code it’d roughly fall back to being an iframe on the original URL, and then YouTube could just check if it’s in a frame and behave as an embed instead of the main UI. But there’s probably a reason why they’ve all done it this kind of way.
Example embed markup being translated to an iframe
@adamnemecek Sep 2013 Makes a joke
on HN thread Moot: Full House
There is this pretty cool research project at Stanford (it's headed by Andrew Ng of the Coursera fame) that uses NLP and machine learning to detect content that the user might prefer not to see. It's still pretty rough around the edges but this demo is pretty cool. [this video]
@SEJeff Sep 2014 Makes a joke
on HN thread TXT Record XSS
From any Linux (or probably OS X) workstation / server, you can run the command "host -t TXT jaimehankins.co.uk" ie: $ host -t TXT jamiehankins.co.uk ;; Truncated, retrying in TCP mode. jamiehankins.co.uk descriptive text "<iframe width='420' height='315' [this video] frameborder='0' allowfullscreen></iframe>" jamiehankins.co.uk descriptive text "v=spf1 include:spf.mandrillapp.com ?all" jamiehankins.co.uk descriptive text "<script src='//peniscorp.com/topkek.js'></script>" jamiehankins.co.uk descriptive text "google-site-verification=nZUP4BagJAjQZO6AImXyzJZBXBf9s1FbDZr8pzNLTCI"
@mike-cardwell Sep 2014 Makes a joke
on HN thread TXT Record XSS
A while ago I experimented with adding stuff to the version.bind field in bind. Just updated it: mike@glue:~$ dig +short chaos txt version.bind @198.211.125.252 "<iframe width='420' height='315' [this video] frameborder='0' allowfullscreen></iframe>" I put this in my named.conf: version "<iframe width='420' height='315' [this video] frameborder='0' allowfullscreen></iframe>"; This site is vulnerable: [link] Although takes a minute before it kicks in. I did report it to them at the time, but never got a response.
@orderlyoctopus Jan 2017 Makes a joke
on HN thread Being Unpredictable Is a Bad Strategy
Read more
Came to say this. A head to head game in the vacuum of a single match, like, say, Chess or Go or Starcraft, is conducive to certain kinds of strategies. You have one opponent and no teammates. Your win is his loss. It's black and white, clearer what you're trying to accomplish. Not all games (or "games", i.e. business) are this simple. There can be multiple players. You may have teammates, or you may need to forge alliances. You may then need to break alliances. There can be multiple degrees of victory or defeat, and multiple paths to victory. Being unpredictable is inherently scary. It's effective in direct conflict because your opponent must account for more possible future situations, diluting his ability to attack you directly, or thwart your true attack directly. Exactly what makes this effective in direct conflict, makes it a liability when seeking alliances. People will not want to cooperate with you if they aren't comfortable in their prediction that cooperation will be beneficial, so they'll only do it if the alternative is worse. Being predictable makes it easy for people to work with you. This opens you up to many opportunities for cooperation you'd otherwise miss. When cooperation is essential to victory, this is immensely powerful and puts a hard limit on how unpredictable you want to be if you'd like to win. And heck, in life and business, maybe relationships with people are most valuable trophy anyway, i.e. [this video]
@wemdyjreichert Sep 2018 Makes a joke
on HN thread Ask HN: How to start a tech blog?
To rephrase, it's not starting the blog itself (that's filling in a template) but coming up with & creating content (that is, the problem facing all content creators). Oh and by the way, this one has much better info: [this video]
@Balgair Mar 2020 Makes a joke
on HN thread Pizza Effect
Read more
Yeah, I want to echo this. The recent-ish rise in drop-bear attacks is also a bit of a pizza effect. It seems that the increase can be traced back to a bacteria that irritates the mouth of the drop bear, making them more prone to attacking humans and other large creatures. Recent results state that the bacterial strain was a mutant strain that originated in a Swedish zoo exhibit of drop bears that were on loan from the Australian government. When one of the mating pair was returned to Australia, the bacteria spread like wildfire (no pun intended) to the wild populations and captive ones. More can be found here: [this video]
@solarkraft Apr 2020 Makes a joke
on HN thread Alphabet in bid to buy Hacker News
A crowd funding campaign has been started to finance one. I'm already a part of it. The introduction video explaining how to join can be found here: [this video]
@NotABott May 2020 Makes a joke
on HN thread Humans Not Invited
Just got in. Greeted as a bot and got a several text messages: 1) tomas say: ya ne botcurl 2) ya tozhe ne bot 3) XSS. Deleted. vk.com/oldlentach 4) ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) 5) ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) 6) Message from bots: we will rule the world some day! ~overc9001 (totally a bot) Missed 7th as it disappeared to quickly and got redirected to [this video] What does it all mean?
@growlist Jun 2020 Makes a joke
on HN thread Toto’s “Africa” Played on Tesla Coils
'The internet is obsessed with two songs and two songs only. But for different reasons. The first is Smash Mouth’s “All Star.”'... 'The world wide web’s other musical obsession though legitimately rules—Toto’s “Africa.”' Surely this is in with a shout? [this video]
@gpm Sep 2022 Makes a joke
on HN thread Diffusion Bee: Stable Diffusion GUI App for M1 Mac
"Stable Diffusion" is referring to one specific set of models, which were trained on a dataset including some porn. The official implementation has a second model that detects pornography, and replaces outputs including it with a picture of this dude [this video] (Not kidding). Removing that is a really simple a one line change in the official script.

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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