The OFFICIAL programming thread
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Y’all might have seen this already on Reddit or Hacker News but, for those that haven’t, it’s a great story. Makes me really nostalgic for that era.
A Teenager's Guide to Avoiding Actual Work
How in 1982, the author successfully hacked his way out of having to fill in potholes.
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@hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:
Y’all might have seen this already on Reddit or Hacker News but, for those that haven’t, it’s a great story. Makes me really nostalgic for that era.
A Teenager's Guide to Avoiding Actual Work
How in 1982, the author successfully hacked his way out of having to fill in potholes.
You successfully hacked your way out of solving a fun problem!!
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@tigger said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:
You successfully hacked your way out of solving a fun problem!!
Me? How so?
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@hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:
@tigger said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:
You successfully hacked your way out of solving a fun problem!!
Me? How so?
Actually, my bad. The “Stalin sort”. I actually thought it was a O(n) but it’s O(n\log(n)). (The problem is usually called longest increasing subsequence)
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The only real hacking I did (aside from hacking around to understand something as every programmer does) was when I was about 15. I became friends with a kid in the same suburb as me who was into cracking and distributing Apple II games and other software. He was right into it and connected with people from around the world who were into it and used phone freaking to get free international calls. He had a side business putting arcade games into places like gas stations and he showed me how to get free credits on arcade machines using a piezo lighter from a stove. Anyway, fun guy to know.
I never really got into what he was doing but one day he tossed me a floppy disk with some game that they had been able to crack the copy protection on but hadn’t been able to overwrite the game’s splash screen with their own names and credits. So I took it home and started hunting through the disk using a hex viewer that I’d written myself. I paged through the data, eventually found where I thought the splash screen was and then somehow autisticly discovered how they’d scrambled the data. I wrote a basic program that unscrambled the image and saved it to disk and then set about updating the credits using a pixel editor that I also wrote myself. Not having done it before and not knowing which piracy crew my friend was with, I didn’t know what to write so I invented a name for myself: “The Buzz Boy” and draw in my name with a circular saw logo. I rescrambled the image, overwrote the original image and proudly gave the floppy disk back to my friend. He was impressed that I’d managed to do it and wanted to know how but when he saw my new moniker, he was like “The Buzz Boy”? Really? And tossed the disk aside like it was the lamest thing he’d ever heard.
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@hog And he was right. Thankfully, we now have a new name for you BB.
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@gustaf said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:
@hog And he was right. Thankfully, we now have a new name for you BB.
Sounds cooler than Twinkie Boy at least.
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I can relate to this
Surprise! Developers' days ruined by interruptions and meetings, GitHub finds
If you want to be happy at work, never meet more than twice a day
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@pakoon said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:
I can relate to this
If you want to be happy at work, never meet more than twice a day
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One thing I do not understand it how you can write this whole damn app which is maybe thousands of lines, yet the documentation is written like a fucking riddle.
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@lithu said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:
One thing I do not understand it how you can write this whole damn app which is maybe thousands of lines, yet the documentation is written like a fucking riddle.
Yeah, but does the app work correctly?
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@lithu said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:
One thing I do not understand it how you can write this whole damn app which is maybe thousands of lines, yet the documentation is written like a fucking riddle.
There’s no comments in the source code?
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@hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:
@lithu said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:
One thing I do not understand it how you can write this whole damn app which is maybe thousands of lines, yet the documentation is written like a fucking riddle.
There’s no comments in the source code?
Hol up! So now I have to go read through the source code instead of reading the documentation!!! FFS!
Source code:
Documentation:
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@lithu said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:
Hol up! So now I have to go read through the source code
That’s where I write my documentation.
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@hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:
@lithu said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:
Hol up! So now I have to go read through the source code
That’s where I write my documentation.
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Documentation is like sex. When it’s good, it is very good. When it is bad, it is better than nothing.
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Comments in the source code as documentation would be a step forward for my shitty developers.
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@hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:
@lithu said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:
Hol up! So now I have to go read through the source code
That’s where I write my documentation.
in what language, australian or cambodian?
If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilized morality to savage morality, or Christian morality to Nazi morality. In fact, of course, we all do believe that some moralities are better than others . . . . The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard . . . admitting that there is such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people's ideas get nearer to that real Right than others."
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@whoofe said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:
@hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:
@lithu said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:
Hol up! So now I have to go read through the source code
That’s where I write my documentation.
in what language, australian or cambodian?
Australia doesn’t have computers.
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How fun that would be if the guy who had to upgrade Hog’s code opens the source and it’s written in Khmer.
