Show HN: Live-updating version of the 'What a week, huh?' meme

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Overall reaction

  • Many commenters find the site hilarious and oddly comforting, especially late at night or midweek.
  • Several say it captures the spirit of the “old web”: small, useless-but-delightful “single-serving sites.”
  • Some want mobile and widget versions, or to use it regularly in Slack/IRC.

Implementation and technical details

  • People expected a hotlinkable, auto-updating image; instead it’s an HTML page with SVG.
  • Suggestions:
    • Serve a bare SVG (or JPEG) to make copy/paste and embedding easier.
    • Use <meta http-equiv="Refresh"> or the HTTP Refresh header to auto-refresh without JS; others note this is deprecated but likely to keep working.
    • Some argue a tiny bit of JavaScript would give true live updates and correct local time without any server logic.
  • Astro is seen by one commenter as heavy for such a tiny site; the author chose it for convenience and SSR.

Time zones, privacy, and standards

  • The current approach uses a Cloudflare Worker and IP-based geolocation for time.
  • Some are confused why IP is needed for “current time” until time zone inference is explained.
  • There’s a debate over a hypothetical “preferred timezone” request header:
    • Pro: avoids geo-IP lookup, more privacy-friendly in theory.
    • Con: adds another fingerprinting vector; could even single out privacy-conscious users if opt-in/opt-out.
  • Others note the client already exposes timezone via JS, and see anti-fingerprinting as a largely lost battle; this is strongly contested by privacy-minded commenters.

Meme semantics and variants

  • Several note the joke lands best midweek (especially Wednesday); by Thursday/Friday or weekend it feels off.
  • Suggestions:
    • Dynamically choose the smallest “uncompleted” unit (day → week → month → year → decade) to preserve the “it’s earlier than it feels” vibe.
    • Add a “century” or “presidency” version, or a 30 Rock/Liz Lemon mode.
  • Some dissect the original “What a week, huh? / It’s Wednesday” dialogue and how it’s often misinterpreted.

Design, UX, and accessibility

  • Keeping the page as just the panel (no visible links) is intentional minimalism; others want clickable navigation between variants.
  • SVG text is defended as easier to align, more flexible, and more accessible than baking the text into images.
  • Dark mode extensions (e.g., inverting text only) can break the captions; moving bubbles into SVG objects is proposed as a fix.
  • Requests include vectorization, localization (especially French), more calendars/languages, and open-sourcing (which has since happened).

Legal and aesthetic notes

  • There’s discussion about whether Tintin imagery is actually in the public domain, with conflicting jurisdiction details.
  • Some purists note the meme’s speech bubbles differ from Hergé’s original style; improving them might reduce the “memey” charm.