On the way to a sales call, a salesman, a project manager, and a programmer were kidnapped. When their employer refused to pay the ransom, the kidnappers granted each a last wish before killing them. The salesman said, "I still want to make the pitch I prepared for today. It's awesome and will only take an hour." The project manager said, "I still want to present my Powerpoint for this project. It's only 92 slides." The programmer said, "Kill me first."
I always hated this joke because to me understanding binary does not mean understanding two's complement. Thus the joke took a on a meta-joke: using two bits to represent a binary state instead of one bit. If the joke teller understood binary in their heart they would use a proper enumeration without just using integers.
It is not, but there are reasons some people say that. Keep in mind this is a posting about jokes. By the way, someone managed to downvote the parent -- what a strange reaction to a joke! Kind of sad, really.
At a place where I used to work, someone had a car with one of those Virginia "Internet C@pital" license plates. The design has changed over the years, but this one put the @ in a big blue dot right in the lower center of the license plate. Sadly, I can't find a pic of this person's plate, or even that style of plate, anymore.
To go off topic a bit here - all these SO articles that are not pinpointed programming questions are always closed or locked. You can no longer ask these kind of open ended, leading to a debate kind of questions on SO anymore. The questions have to be very focused and narrow so that someone can answer it to get points. Its really disappointing but that is just the way the community took it in - pedantic.
On SO, mod points are granted by how many "points" you have. The idea is that if you have that many points, you got them by asking good questions, writing good answers, and generally being a good citizen on the site. But if you allow jokes or open-ended questions, then people get tons of points and mod powers even it they don't really contribute to the content of the site.
It would help if they allowed open-ended questions that are marked "community wiki" (which means the author doesn't get points for the post). But you'd still end up with a lot of off-topic content getting upvoted on the front page which would be annoying.
"It would help if they allowed open-ended questions that are marked "community wiki""
And then we'd have quora, which would not be Stack Overflow. The intention of the site from day one was to encourage specific answerable programming questions that do not involve endless open ended discussion.
I truly believe this narrow scope of acceptable question type is why the site is hugely popular.
I don't understand how people don't get this even after five and a half years.
Before I click, just a quick bet with myself this excellent question has been closed.
[edit] yep, locked. Thanks NullUserException! Now another quick bet with myself that someone will reply to this comment defending S.O.s repeated closure of interesting questions.
I get incredible value out of Stack Overflow. Do you not?
Does the fact that this question is locked diminish its value or the value of Stack Overflow in any way?
Of course, Stack Overflow is not made for interesting questions. Notice that I am not defending this descision, I am merely stating it. You know this, which is why you were accurately able to predict that this question would be closed. Why is this interesting enough to warrant commenting that this is the case also today?
Ditto. I stopped contributing to Stack Overflow because of this.
It's a classic example of cart-before-the-horse product thinking. Users aren't there to follow your orders; they're people with actual needs that you're trying to serve. I get that they don't want the site to be overrun with goofy content, because that prevents you from serving other actual needs. But there are better solutions than tasking a large number of people with running around and jerkily stomping out anything that doesn't fit the owners' precise vision.
I think this is the exact mistake that Friendster made. And really, the same one Google Plus made. Neither of those products were built for the users; they were built to serve the owners' desires.
I spend 12+ hours a day coding, across a variety of technologies that I'm only semi-familiar with. Stack Overflow saves my sanity on an hourly basis.
It seems like 9/10 of the useful questions are closed by mods, though the answer is usually there anyway. I'm not sure what to make of that, but the quality there is still high.
If you want to participate on the website, you should actually participate. If you do nothing, then other people are going to run the site and you won't have any input.
What's your point, then? You are explicitly stating that you have interest mostly in passively receiving stuff that's out of the site's scope, not interested in actively participating, and not interested in changing the site orientation.
In other words, the site is not interesting to you, yet you choose to rant about it; very strange. Does the very existence of StackOverflow bother you?
(There are other sites on the Internet, y'know. It's not like SO is preventing you from visiting /r/ProgrammerJokes instead.)
How about some examples? I was a diamond mod (Kev) for a while and the stuff we were closing either fell wildly outside the scope of the site, or was just spam/garbage.
If you're unhappy about a question being closed (the community can and does make mistakes) then bring it up on meta-SO. If the question was closed by mistake then more often than not it'll be re-opened if you explain why.
Huh. I was pretty sure this was one question everyone could understand was off-topic, but I guess I was wrong.
Interestingly, this HN submission is illustrating the original reason Jeff Atwood locked the post in 2009 - nobody can be bothered to even read the first page before posting their own joke.
Of the 20+ pages already there, no one has yet posted the funny one from xkcd or Dilbert. No other site on the Internet can put these two sources together like Stack Overflow can.
No one's complaining about the lack of cat photos and memegenerator links on Hacker News, but here we are again decrying Stack Overflow trying to keep its signal to noise ratio high.
The historical lock is an appeasement for those who like to binge on candy all day long and not realise a site built on 90% candy is no place for quality.
You're laying bets all over the place. How about putting forth a cogent argument why these type of questions need to reside on Stack Overflow and not on reddit or Hacker News?
Well put. There is actually a major difference between a joke thread here and a joke thread on Stack Overflow: on HN, it would be on the front page for a few hours or perhaps a day at most (less if the volume of comments triggered the anti-flamewar code). But on Stack Overflow, the joke thread was being bumped to the front page every day for months; any edit or new answer jumps it to the top again, even if that answer is a copy of six other answers.
>If you're happy and you know it, missing quote
missing quote
>IfYoureHappyAndYouKnowItNotAVerb
Not a verb
>If you're happy and you know it, then your face will surely show it, If you're happy and you know it, syntax error
syntax error
The thing about this joke is that the accountant is (kinda) right. Suppose they pass one field with about 1000 sheep and lots and lots of fields with ~5 sheep. Someone who thinks "about 1000" + 5 = "about 1000" is going to get a very wrong answer, and someone who thinks "about 1000" + 5 = "about 1005" is going to do much better.
This is also why, when combining floating-point values of different widths, it is better to say single + double -> double than single + double -> single, and why the concept of "significant figures" as commonly taught in schools is dangerous.
At a friend's wedding, I delivered the toast which was a long list of "To X!" items, where X was something special to/for/about the couple. This worked spectacularly well. Including the dead silence & puzzled looks, and seething consternation from the groom, at "To RTFM!" halfway thru.
Oh god! From the enterprise code I've seen, American large companies must be hotbeds of communism!
And now that I think about it, enterprise systems may be fully realized soviet states. There are long queues for often meager returns, there are a large number of factories that produce mysterious junk, security policies are both incomprehensible and harsh, and to get anything done, you have to know somebody.
This is pretty accurate, actually, and has been studied by economists, for whom this was a huge problem: If the free market is supposed to be so great, then why are firms not organized as markets internally? In fact, why do they exist in the first place? In a sense, the existence of firms is evidence that a free market is not the best organizing principle for everything.
My personal theory is that this is mainly about the primate dominance dynamic. Markets really do work better, but too many people would rather be the alpha monkey to care about little things like organizational effectiveness.
Of course, to bring this back on topic, as a software guy I'm inclined to think it's a hardware problem.
Since you're referring to the Wikipedia page, you are probably aware that there is a reasonable economic answer related to transaction costs and asymmetric information:
"Instead, for Coase the main reason to establish a firm is to avoid some of the transaction costs of using the price mechanism. These include discovering relevant prices (which can be reduced but not eliminated by purchasing this information through specialists), as well as the costs of negotiating and writing enforceable contracts for each transaction (which can be large if there is uncertainty). Moreover, contracts in an uncertain world will necessarily be incomplete and have to be frequently re-negotiated. The costs of haggling about division of surplus, particularly if there is asymmetric information and asset specificity, may be considerable."
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 199 ms ] threadThe assembly panel is very funny.
I was hoping that were a joke :(
There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, those who don't, and those who didn't expect this joke to be in base three.
The barman replies "Hello, you'd like a beer?"
"Yes," replies the TCP packet, "I'd like a beer."
I'd tell you my UDP packet joke, but I'm not sure you'd get it.
A neutrino walks into a bar."
(read on /. years ago IIRC)
- Javascript programmers have no class.
- Psst...did you hear Haskell is stateless? Pass it on.
The usual:
Then there was: Which is a riff on: Then along came: Yours, on the other hand, just doesn't really make sense. Maybe I'm missing something ......or off by 1 error.
OK, I'm confused too :)
Also the proper syntax is 0b10 not 10.
> A Chinese spy manages to steal the last 50MB of the program governing U.S. missile launches. Fortunately, it was all closing parentheses.
or
> A Chinese spy manages to steal the last 50MB of the program governing U.S. missile launches. Fortunately, it was Lisp.
A Chinese spy stole the last 48MB of the Abram's targeting system. To our good fortunes this was only the closing parentheses.
Fortunately it was in Lisp, so it was all closing parentheses.
(I know what you're going to say… but the parent joke predates incremental garbage collection.)
The license number was "CAR JPG".
I SO wish I had a pic to prove this.
I don't see the '@' anywhere which leads me to believe this may be a fake/photoshop. Still, quite interesting... :)
In your picture it would be covered by the license plate frame.
It would help if they allowed open-ended questions that are marked "community wiki" (which means the author doesn't get points for the post). But you'd still end up with a lot of off-topic content getting upvoted on the front page which would be annoying.
And then we'd have quora, which would not be Stack Overflow. The intention of the site from day one was to encourage specific answerable programming questions that do not involve endless open ended discussion.
I truly believe this narrow scope of acceptable question type is why the site is hugely popular.
I don't understand how people don't get this even after five and a half years.
[edit] yep, locked. Thanks NullUserException! Now another quick bet with myself that someone will reply to this comment defending S.O.s repeated closure of interesting questions.
Does the fact that this question is locked diminish its value or the value of Stack Overflow in any way?
Of course, Stack Overflow is not made for interesting questions. Notice that I am not defending this descision, I am merely stating it. You know this, which is why you were accurately able to predict that this question would be closed. Why is this interesting enough to warrant commenting that this is the case also today?
The message that sends to me is "Your question isn't worthy of our site. Go away."
So, yeah, it does make using the site less pleasant, and thus reduces its value to me.
It's a classic example of cart-before-the-horse product thinking. Users aren't there to follow your orders; they're people with actual needs that you're trying to serve. I get that they don't want the site to be overrun with goofy content, because that prevents you from serving other actual needs. But there are better solutions than tasking a large number of people with running around and jerkily stomping out anything that doesn't fit the owners' precise vision.
I think this is the exact mistake that Friendster made. And really, the same one Google Plus made. Neither of those products were built for the users; they were built to serve the owners' desires.
It seems like 9/10 of the useful questions are closed by mods, though the answer is usually there anyway. I'm not sure what to make of that, but the quality there is still high.
Also, if you are betting with yourself, doesn't it mean that you lose when you win?
Surely you can make a good case for it on meta.stackoverflow.com?
If they don't get those mods on a leash pretty soon, someone else will come along and drink their milkshake and I won't have to do anything.
In other words, the site is not interesting to you, yet you choose to rant about it; very strange. Does the very existence of StackOverflow bother you?
(There are other sites on the Internet, y'know. It's not like SO is preventing you from visiting /r/ProgrammerJokes instead.)
Other than that, great point.
"Does the very existence of StackOverflow bother you?"
No, but the existence of abusive moderators does.
When I run across locked threads on SO, I'm not searching for "jokes". These are actual programming-related questions.
Please don't imply that I said things that I didn't. Thanks.
If you're unhappy about a question being closed (the community can and does make mistakes) then bring it up on meta-SO. If the question was closed by mistake then more often than not it'll be re-opened if you explain why.
Interestingly, this HN submission is illustrating the original reason Jeff Atwood locked the post in 2009 - nobody can be bothered to even read the first page before posting their own joke.
Yes, it's locked too, and it too was deleted for a year or so before the current crop of moderators undeleted and locked it.
The historical lock is an appeasement for those who like to binge on candy all day long and not realise a site built on 90% candy is no place for quality.
You're laying bets all over the place. How about putting forth a cogent argument why these type of questions need to reside on Stack Overflow and not on reddit or Hacker News?
An engineer and an accountant are on a train when they pass between two fields of sheep.
"Boy, there are a lot of sheep in those fields." says the engineer.
"There are 1,005" says the accountant.
"How do you know?"
"Well, there are about 1,000 in that field, and there are 5 in the other one."
This is also why, when combining floating-point values of different widths, it is better to say single + double -> double than single + double -> single, and why the concept of "significant figures" as commonly taught in schools is dangerous.
Logn time
The class system has dissolved and the state controls everything.
And now that I think about it, enterprise systems may be fully realized soviet states. There are long queues for often meager returns, there are a large number of factories that produce mysterious junk, security policies are both incomprehensible and harsh, and to get anything done, you have to know somebody.
You may want to start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm
Of course, to bring this back on topic, as a software guy I'm inclined to think it's a hardware problem.
"Instead, for Coase the main reason to establish a firm is to avoid some of the transaction costs of using the price mechanism. These include discovering relevant prices (which can be reduced but not eliminated by purchasing this information through specialists), as well as the costs of negotiating and writing enforceable contracts for each transaction (which can be large if there is uncertainty). Moreover, contracts in an uncertain world will necessarily be incomplete and have to be frequently re-negotiated. The costs of haggling about division of surplus, particularly if there is asymmetric information and asset specificity, may be considerable."
Architect: Of course God was an architect! Look at the world! It's so beautiful and well composed!
Engineer: Nah, you don't know what you're saying! God was an engineer! Look at the universe and all it contains!
Programmer: Pfft... who do you think created chaos?