Top all-time · #3958
Brian Wigginton
Personal blog · bwiggs.com/postsprogrammingdesign
Brian Wigginton's personal blog at bwiggs.com covers programming and design. Since 2021, 20 different Hacker News readers have linked it 20 times, most often “The Queen's Duck”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-04-21, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (17) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link the 'queen's duck' notebook entry, an apocryphal story about a pointless change, such as a duck added to an animation, that gets requested to be removed to keep a stakeholder happy.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 17 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Brian Wigginton
Most-linked posts?
- The Queen's Duck19 people · 19 mentions · first linked 2021-08-16
What Hacker News says?
Visual Design Challenges is one I hear most frontend developer complain about. I explained a queen duck ( https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/ ) to one of them and he started doing that several times in his project. If you look at this git repo, there would be commits called " queen duck " right before he would demo so he could get feedback about the "mistake" he made, revert the commit and move on with his life.
Comment linking /notebook/queens-duck/
on “Software development topics I've changed my mind on”Submitted The Queen's Duck as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI’m glad Obsidian is publishing this, even though the spec clearly isn’t ready yet. If I had the final say for how this format were to be publicized, I would probably just include the JSON schema “as-is” in the Obsidian developer docs. Then, it’s just as usable by third parties without making promises about interoperability. But Obsidian is thinking ahead here. They’ve intentionally given us a duck to poke at[1], kn…
Comment linking /notebook/queens-duck/
on “JSON Canvas – An open file format for infinite canvas data”Submitted The Queen's Duck as a story · 1 points
HN discussionLove this! Unrelated, but reminds me of another story featuring Chess and a Duck, and also relevant to the HN audience, which relates to the old videogame Battle Chess: https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/
Comment linking /notebook/queens-duck/
on “Duck Chess”Submitted The Queen's Duck as a story · 1 points
HN discussionAlso called “The Queen’s duck”. https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/
Comment linking /notebook/queens-duck/
on “How to feel engaged at work: a software engineer's guide”Kinda like "the queen's duck" ( https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/ ).
Comment linking /notebook/queens-duck/
on “The Theatre of Pull Requests and Code Review”You are likely deluding yourself about your skill level; I’ve had the habit of tracking my peer's productivity (on Shotgrid) to stay above their metrics, and even if I could say objectively to be the faster in my dept., that is irrelevant. VFX needs different kinds of people, and I can’t count how many times “less” productive artists came up with very beautiful and ingenious solutions that I haven’t thought about it…
Comment linking /notebook/queens-duck/
on “Hollywood’s visual effects crisis”Perhaps not common, but certainly still in use: The Queen’s Duck - https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/
Comment linking /notebook/queens-duck/
on “Commonly used idioms in the tech industry”So you're saying it's like the Queen's duck? https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/
Comment linking /notebook/queens-duck/
on “NASA selects a plan to "swarm" Proxima Centauri with tiny probes”aka the Queen’s Duck: https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/
Comment linking /notebook/queens-duck/
on “The Facebook Text Prompt Zombie Land”Ah yes, the queen's duck! I've told that story countless times. I bet it's super effective here. https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/ (p.s. I don't mean to nitpick over a perfectly clear message, but it's "much ado")
Comment linking /notebook/queens-duck/
on “Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn”https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/ :)
Comment linking /notebook/queens-duck/
on “Why does the moon change size when you snipe it in GTA?”Somebody missed the memo: https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/
Comment linking /notebook/queens-duck/
on “macOS Sonoma Boot Failures”There's a related (apocryphal?) story from Interplay about adding a duck to animations so that the producer would ask for it to be removed, to make him happy, while leaving the rest alone. https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/
Comment linking /notebook/queens-duck/
on “I found a Vulnerability. They found a Lawyer”This reminded me of this apocryphal story. "Just one thing - get rid of the duck." https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/
Comment linking /notebook/queens-duck/
on “Nature retracts controversial superconductivity paper by embattled physicist”"The Queen's duck" https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/
Comment linking /notebook/queens-duck/
on “Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems”Is this a case of "removing the duck"? https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/
Comment linking /notebook/queens-duck/
on “Sweet Jeebus, macOS 27 Golden Gate Removes the Dumb Icons from Menu Items”DEFCON30, Mayhem CTF. We were given a file full of random bytes. The flag was in there somewhere. It was too random to be encrypted, there wasn't any structure. `file` didn't return anything, truly just a bag of bytes. I had decided to install `hexyl` as an alternative option to some of the other hex editors installed o my linux machine. All the bytes were colored grey. I scrolled the file and noticed a blip of yell…
Comment linking /posts/2023-08-31-hacking-in-color/
on “Your hex editor should color-code bytes”
