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rbanffy
I use the "P.T. Barnum was right." quote all the time... Sometimes I even mis-attribute it to Wirth.
darwinGod
I think it's an April fool joke- This article is atleast couple of years old.

http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/unix-hoax.html

michael_dorfman
A couple? It's ancient. Here's a sighting from 1998, but I am sure it goes back further than that.

http://www.infolanka.com/jokes/messages/1665.html

darwinGod
Oh wow!! My sympathies for C/C++ developers not being able to Google errors pre 1998 :-) This article should have come from the bottom of the heart of some really "experienced" developer ;-) On another note,I really think the title of this article should be modified to indicate that this was a prank mail. Never know if some power twitter user has already opened a protest page on Facebook, tweeted this, and is attracting some hundreds of fans!!
vog
Why linking to a site that gives no attribution to the author and is filled with ads?

Using any search engine, it's easy to find a better source within under a minute: http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/unix-hoax.html

That's why I created a competitive HN entry:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1903113

8ren
I didn't see any ads, probably because of adblock. And given the nature of its conceit, I didn't expect an attribution. I just came across it and thought HN would appreciate it.
vog
Almost any link on that site points to LinkScan products. Below the text, there is also an explicit text advertisement for LinkScan.

In addition, the site does not only fail to give attribution, but also claims to have a copyright on the whole text:

"© Copyright 1997-2010 Electronic Software Publishing Corporation (Elsop)"

This is a well-designed link-spam site, but still a link-spam site. Do not support it. It is part of the so-called "spamdexing" problem. More information:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamdexing