I think prolific in this case is more the "Super Whizkid DJ Creates 100,000 Tracks in a Week" sense -- not in the sense that you may or may not have heard of them...
Saying something absurd isn’t automatically a joke that I am expected to get. This is humor on the same level as typing the N word in all caps or just lying. It’s not funny, it’s not clever.
pro·lif·ic (adj)
marked by abundant inventiveness or productivity
It's just a fun title for his article about programmatically creating millions of remixes, thus becoming a very prolific DJ. That's the entire joke. It doesn't seem equivalent to "typing the N word in all caps." I'm sorry that your sense of humor is simply too refined to understand us uneducated peasants' jokes.
Also you really just made a throwaway to insult someone's article?
Outside of the joke - I'd say your own definition of prolific undermines you pretty hard there.
While I respect the author for the goal here, I would say he was neither abundantly inventive nor productive.
His inventiveness boiled down to taking an existing concept, and saving some disk space using an already known algorithm. To boot - his method of saving that space rendered the original intent (preventing copywrite of melodies) useless, and was already considered by the original group.
His productivity was a single morning's work, creating a single album, which is just random noise and will never be meaningfully listened to even a single time.
I'm not going to begrudge him the usage in the title, and I think it's a fun weekend project, but I also think it's pretty clearly clickbait (which is fine!).
Purely playing devil's advocate here - Keep reading that definition you pulled up!
"There are many different definitions of productivity (including those that are not defined as ratios of output to input) and the choice among them depends on the purpose of the productivity measurement and/or data availability."
So really what we're arguing about is the "purpose of the productivity measurement". I don't think "number of melodies that will never be listened to" is a particularly good measure for "DJ", but it is a great measure for a blog title.
yeah, he's not, by any definition, the first line of the article says that is an alternate clickbait as a joke which maybe allows it to comply with HN posting guidelines, but given that the poster's username has the NL acronym in it which probably means Netherlands, and the Dutch-like name of the author of the article, (and actual prolific DJ scene in that country), its probably the same person, so its unknown if that actually makes it fit HN posting guidelines to me
Its amusing, it got me to click though and I was pleased by what I read