Chicken chicken chicken
Why Hacker News recommends it
Beloved as a humor masterpiece and often cited as required viewing on what not to do in an academic talk.
What it is
Doug Zongker's deadpan conference presentation of his famously chicken-filled paper, given at the 2007 AAAS humor session. It satirizes academic talks while showing the pitfalls of bad presentation.
Recommended by 5 HN commenters across 6 different months, 2013 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec jerf · 2018-11 · on “A History of the Sentence "Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo." (1999-2015)”
It may not be the original video, but a video presentation of it is available at [this video] by the original author, contrary to the link's claims. It is probably the better way to approach the paper, due to the importance of timing in comedy and the fact that paper presents so much to you in a way that it can't control the timing, though unfortunately the video resolution is quite low. Plus the Q&A is pretty good. It is an amusing combination of video that is a trenchant commentary on the excessive similarity of the vast bulk of hard science papers, and a video that my four year old enjoyed back in the day. That puts your standard "family friendly" comedy movie to shame in terms of how much com
Strong rec fbdab103 · 2023-04 · on “Trashcan – web based service for indexing scientific papers, or other documents”
That chicken paper always gets a chuckle from me. In case you have never seen the video[0]. Unfortunately, it appears to have been recorded on a potato. Do not miss the audience question at the end. Beautiful academic satire. [0] [this video]
Strong rec jerf · 2023-04 · on “Chicken Chicken Chicken: Chicken Chicken [pdf]”
If you've read a lot of papers and/or attended conference presentations, you will find that you almost know what he is saying in the presentation version: [this video] . The same charts in every presentation; up and to the right, my thing higher than previous thing, here's some boxes and lines that really mean nothing in this context, some standardized statistical distribution with my dots scattered about... there's a fairly standard presentation that one could give with almost just a few made up payload words for your thing and it would apply to almost anything. I particularly remember in one of my machine learning classes where we had to give project presentations, the degree to which you could
Strong rec Joel_Mckay · 2024-06 · on “A long guide to giving a short academic talk (2022)”
Or one can quickly learn how to achieve clear presentations by indexing the common errata: "Chicken chicken chicken" (Yoram Bauman) [this video] This should be required viewing for every academic author. =3
Recommends baggers · 2013-07 · on “Show HN: Chicken chicken chicken – chicken chicken programming language”
Do check out the presentation ( [this video] ) as he goes into a fairy bit of detail on the motivations and implementation of the project. Fairly moving actually
Recommends JamesCoyne · 2022-11 · on “I quit my programmer job to become a chicken”
Yeah, the paper provides good insight into the phenomenon. Doug also gives a really good presentation on the same material: [this video]
Recommends Joel_Mckay · 2025-11 · on “Learning to read Arthur Whitney's C to become smart (2024)”
"Still it's amusing how Whitney's style seems to personally offend people" So it was for the lols after all... Notably, a Lisp interpreter written in Lisp is a common assignment for second year CS students. In a production setting, there is little reason to misappropriate resources for such toys. Bud Haggert still teaches smart people something very important about communication with interdisciplinary crowds: [LINK] Doug Zongker's presentation similarly instructs people how to make better presentations to peers by demonstrating what not to do: [this video] Best of luck =3
Cites feyman_r · 2023-04 · on “Chicken Chicken Chicken: Chicken Chicken [pdf]”
Almost like a test from my POV (non-American) ;). From Bing/ChatGPT: The purpose of this paper is not clear from the current web page context, which consists of mostly the word "chicken" repeated in various ways. However, based on web search results, it seems that this paper is a *humorous presentation* by Doug Zongker, a computer scientist from the University of Washington¹. He created this paper to mock the format and style of scientific papers and presentations, and to demonstrate how little content and meaning can be conveyed by using jargon and graphs³. The paper was presented at the AAAS humor session in 2007¹³, and has been viewed online by many people who find it amusing²³. Source: C