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HEADON! Apply directly to the forehead!

KyleLC
Comedy
YouTube
Cited on HN 5 times, 2014–2025, never outright recommended score 0
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

Used purely as a joke or meme reference whenever a thread mentions heads, or repetitive ads.

A TiVo-captured clip of the notoriously repetitive 2006 Head On headache remedy commercial, with its 'apply directly to the forehead' jingle.

5 jokes · Comedy

5 Hacker News comments

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

@SimHacker Mar 2014 Makes a joke
on HN thread Rendering Head in WebGL
And if you order before midnight tonight, we will include a free sample of HEAD ON: Apply directly to the forehead! [this video]
@DonHopkins Oct 2019 Makes a joke
on HN thread Representing and Editing JSON with Spreadsheets (2018)
Read more
I've meant to contribute to this discussion and answer questions, but this article is more than a year old, and I've been it regularly and made lots of progress since then, I feel I should writing a fresh new article about it, including some actual documentation and examples. I'll post it to HN as soon as I'm done, and put a link to it here. And I would appreciate hearing from anyone who's interested in or working on similar ideas, so we can collaborate to combine our forces! (Email in profile.) It also needs a good name! (As a rule of thumb, I try not to get bogged down in naming things when I should be spending my time actually working on them and using them, to figure out what they actually are before naming them. But it's been more than a year and now I want to talk about it more mellifluously.) I was calling it "JSONster", but that sounded too monstrous, don't describe it, and nobody gets the Napster reference these days. So I tried to think of better name by repeatedly pounded my fist against my forehead, which gave me a headache, when suddenly a homeopathic solution to my naming problem sprang to mind: "SpreadON", short for "Spreadsheet Object Notation". Elevator Pitch: SpreadON applies JSON to spreadsheets like butter to waffles, so it melts into the nooks and crannies. Marketing Ploy: SpreadON: Apply directly to the spreadsheet. SpreadON: Apply directly to the spreadsheet. SpreadON: Apply directly to the spreadsheet. [this video] [link] >HeadOn is the brand name of a topi
@DonHopkins Mar 2023 Makes a joke
on HN thread Analyzing multi-gigabyte JSON files locally
You still have to pay for a 64 bit pointer to an un-interned string though. It's the fact that the keys are repeated for each record that overwhelms the size of the keys or pointers themselves, when you have millions of records. If you are using fixed structures, then the keys are implicit and don't need to be repeated or even represented as pointers, just known fixed offsets into the structures. I wrote this about "Representing and Editing JSON with Spreadsheets": [link] [link] SpreadOn: Apply Directly to the Forehead. [this video]
@DonHopkins Sep 2025 Makes a joke
on HN thread TV Time Machine: A Raspberry Pi That Plays Random 90s TV
I'd love to have a database of once-annoying but now-nostalgic TV commercials to intersperse between the shows, and insert into commercial breaks. (Those dramatic pauses in Star Trek TOS just aren't the same without a Crazy Eddie interruption.) HEAD ON: Apply Directly to the Forehead: [this video] W.E.T. P.E.T.S.: [link] Fine Corinthian Leather: [link] Bic Banana Ink Crayon: [link] Flea Market Montgomery: [link] Crazy Eddie: [link]

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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