No, it doesn't. It just sends 1 ECHO_REQUEST packet. If this was sarcasm I could not detect it

Above: someone tries humor on Hacker News. It goes exactly as expected.

Is it possible you and your parent (my child) are deepening the sarcasm to indistinguishable degrees? I think not, but I like to imagine.

It seems to give up before sending anything at all:

    ping: invalid argument: '-1': out of range: 1 <= value <= 9223372036854775807

Programmer humor is generally terrible

Hah, clearly you have no idea of what you are talking! In order to ascertain the general level of humor of a programmer, you would have to assume all programmers are equivalent! Furthermore you would be assuming that there is one kind of humor, which is clearly a fallacy. Finally, the amount of "terribleness" you allude to cannot be quantified in such a way as to distinguish an objective level of quality. Therefore you are clearly wrong! Try doing some research before you share such a naive opinion in the future.

qed

The `-c -1` reads like it's requesting sending negative one pings, hence the reversal.

A gnip!