It's curious to see how these quotes add over time and how they progress from dad jokes to more sophisticated, event statements
Empty your memory, with a free(), like a pointer.\nIf you cast a pointer to a integer, it becomes the integer.\nIf you cast a pointer to a struct, it becomes the struct.\nThe pointer can crash, and can overflow.\nBe a pointer my friend."
or
Freedom of expression is like the air we breathe, we don't feel it, until people take it away from us.\n\nFor this reason, Je suis Charlie, not because I endorse everything they published, but because I cherish the right to speak out freely without risk even when it offends others.\nAnd no, you cannot just take someone's life for whatever he/she expressed.\n\nHence this \"Je suis Charlie\" edition.\n
> Empty your mind.
Be formless, shapeless, like water.
You put water into a cup; it becomes the cup.
You put it into a teapot; it becomes the teapot.
You put water into a bottle; it becomes the bottle.
Now water can flow, or it can crash!
Be water, my friend.
Sadly C and C++ have aliasing rules, so casting a pointer to another type is often UB instead of having the underlying memory take the form of the new type.
There are some zen quotes and teachings that compare our minds to the contents of a cup vs the vessel (body). In Daoism you have the yin/yang aspects. Afaik The quote seems to be his.
That quote is indeed his. I listened to Shannon Lee's (his daughter) podcast, and she told the story of when he understood it.
Apparently when his martial arts teacher told him he was too forceful, to be more like water, and then banned him from practicing until he understood. Short story, he went on a boat ride, got angry, started punching the river, then he got that aha moment.
Bruce Lee was actually a really wise dude. I also highly recommend the podcast.
I stumbled on this one before. Still one of my favorite quotes:
---
"Francis bacon"
"Knowledge is power. France is bacon.
When I was young my father said to me: "Knowledge is power, Francis Bacon." I understood it as "Knowledge is power, France is bacon."
For more than a decade I wondered over the meaning of the second part and what was the surreal linkage between the two. If I said the quote to someone, "Knowledge is power, France is Bacon", they nodded knowingly. Or someone might say, "Knowledge is power" and I'd finish the quote "France is Bacon" and they wouldn't look at me like I'd said something very odd, but thoughtfully agree. I did ask a teacher what did "Knowledge is power, France is bacon" mean and got a full 10-minute explanation of the "knowledge is power" bit but nothing on "France is bacon". When I prompted further explanation by saying "France is bacon?" in a questioning tone I just got a "yes". At 12 I didn't have the confidence to press it further. I just accepted it as something I'd never understand.
It wasn't until years later I saw it written down that the penny dropped.
"
I guess with a C++ file this big, you need some humor to keep your sanity.
Anyway, this one resonated with me: "vi has two modes - 'beep repeatedly' and 'break everything'"
Here is another interesting one: "A cookie has no soul, it's just a cookie. But before it was milk and eggs. And in eggs there's the potential for life", Jean-Claude van Damme
Thank you for this, though I will recommend that next time you use something that wraps, as this view still doesn't work for phones (I have to keep scrolling left and right).
I actually tested a bunch of those on GH Copilot -- sure enough, it does autocomplete certain prompts. No wonder, some are probably known quotes. Anyway, when I'm feeling down in my VSCode environment, I enter some random prompts in search of a pun. Most of the time it's just random rambling but hey:
# (prompt: my dog ...) seems to be interested in the plot.
You mean people give it to you? You can't get away with taking one billion dollars from others without their permission unless you are the government ;)
You're assuming that the statement vacuously means "money is never made," which is not what it's getting at. The point is that nobody has ever become a billionaire without manipulating markets, exploiting employees, misleading investors, or otherwise abusing the fabric of society to squeeze wealth out of the rest of the world. The guy who invents the thing isn't the one who gets rich. It's his employer who profits off of it. It's not hard to make money, but it's impossible to make a billion dollars. You can only get that much by taking it.
The amount of money/value/richness in the world is not constant.
Suppose we all lived on an island in a completely stable economy valued somehow at 1 trillion dollars.
Then imagine that a dozen or so explorers went to another island and started a completely independent economy that (after some centuries) gets also valued at 1 trillion dollars.
The latter billion dollar was created at the meager cost of a boat and the life work of some people.
This is a horrible analogy for anything that ever happened, but it is something that could possibly happen.
Money just gets arbitarily created by banks. It is easy to "make money".
Maintaining a stable, accepted currency however, is quite hard and so is providing enough value for others, that they give you a billion dollars of a stable, accepted currency ...
Translations for the few quotes that are in French:
> Je mange donc je chie. — Don Ho
"I eat therefore I shit."
It's a pun on René Descartes' "Je pense donc je suis" (I think, therefore I am).
> Mathématiquement, un cocu est un entier qui partage sa moitié avec un tiers.
"Mathematically, a cuckold is a whole who shares his half with a third [party]."
> Si un jour une chaise te dit que t'as un joli cul, tu xtrouveras ça bizarre mais c'est juste un compliment d'objet direct.
"If some day a chair tells you you have a pretty ass, you'll find that weird but it's just a direct object compliment."
It's a pun on "complément d'objet direct" (the object that is put directly after a transitive verb), intentionally being misspelled as "compliment d'objet direct" to mean that it's a direct compliment from an object.
> Mon pied droit est jaloux de mon pied gauche. Quand l'un avance, l'autre veut le dépasser. Et moi, comme un imbécile, je marche ! — Raymond Devos
"My right foot is jealous of my left foot. When one goes forward, the other wants to overtake it. And I, like an imbecile, I'm walking!
> > Mathématiquement, un cocu est un entier qui partage sa moitié avec un tiers.
> "Mathematically, a cuckold is a whole who shares his half with a third [party]."
In French "moitié", which means "half", is also slang for "spouse" (or girlfriend, significant other, etc... you get the idea). "tiers" indeed means "third" or "third party".
"entier" means "integer" in a mathematical sense, but more generally, it means "whole", and by extension, "uncastrated".
So "un entier qui partage sa moitié avec un tiers" can be loosely translated as "an (uncastrated) man who shares his girlfriend with a third party" in addition to the mathematical meaning of "an integer that shares its half with a third".
"comme un imbécile, je marche" has the double meaning of "I walk" / "I fall for it". A possible translation would be "And I, like an imbecile, go along with it".
Your local pedant feels compelled to share that this is a paraphrase of a quote from JWZ on regular expressions, which in turn credits back to a quote from someone named D Tilbrook on awk
"Me: \"I'm 45 years old but I've got a 19 year-old young man's body\"\nHer: \"Show me\"\nI opened the freezer to show her the body.\nShe screamed.\nMe too.\n") }
Elon should have talked to Bill Gates before firing half of Twitter: "Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight."
Logically incorrect. Maybe that is the joke. Should be: "The best things in life are free. Notepad++ is free. Therefore if something is not free, it cannot be one of the best things, or notepad++"
That's great, and it's not all CS quotes. It reminds me of the quotes from the old UNIX fortune program [1] that many systems or accounts would be configured to use to show a quote on each login.
An old favorite of mine is the exception message "God Damned Exception" [0]
I stumbled across it in 2007, the day after Windows Vista was released. I installed Windows Vista, and the first thing that I installed was Notepad++. Shortly thereafter, I got a popup "God Damned Exception", but it wasn't immediately clear what application was raising it. I thought it was humorous to entertain the possibility that Vista had been released with this oversight. But... notepad++ was the only thing installed that was not Vanilla out-of-the-box Vista, so I searched through the notepad++ source to find/confirm it. It's been a favorite of mine ever since.
ROTFL. Enough for ten standup routines in there. "Take my Surface Pro 3, PLEASE!"
The only funny thing about that code is that someone took the time to type in hundreds of "funny" and "inspirational" quotes into the source code, gone to die in the depths of Notepad++.
Kind of niche and specific to X11, but one my favorite quotes is from jwz [1]:
"X is slow because of the separation of servers and clients, i.e., the client-server model, i.e., its network capacity. It doesn't matter that it uses shared segments in the degenerate case -- it still takes a dozen context-switches amongst three different processes before an X client can even pick its nose."
I recall a feature that would show a quote in a new document each time the application was opened. I'm not sure if This is the same quotes in the source.
Unfortunately I couldn't find any information about this on Google but it was documented in one of the older change logs.
Heh heh heh ... {TEXT("Elon Musk"), QuoteParams::rapid, false, SC_CP_UTF8, L_TEXT, TEXT("Don't set your password as your child's name.\nName your child after your password."
The one before the last is ascii art (I hope the formatting doesn't get messed up, sorry if it does).
EDIT : It actually does, so here is a screenshot instead : https://ibb.co/Kr67DHk
I kinda miss Notepad++. Or rather, I miss the OS having a unified look and feel, and Notepad++ being a great editor within the constraints of a unified look and feel.
Isn´t it a very obvious thing to get the idea that the information of this site should not be hidden inside an ancient three-column design that resembles the antique NukeCMS (PHP)?
Why is the most important coder website build in a way that hides information so hard?
What purpose do the left and right column with empty space serve?
Once I used to install some user css to get 100% width for the content, but I got tired to do that.
How can such a design dinosaur survive for so long right in the center of "modern development tools"?
If it did not explicitly set a max width, then the code would be much more convenient to read: https://i.imgur.com/hxoHJHM.png
It's a critique of overarching design consistency trumping actual usability.
---
Though to be fair it is still against the guidelines:
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
HN rewrites headline text by default, but if you edit and save afterwards it doesn't rewrite the second version. Maybe the same is true of the URL text?
To see them in action, type the word "random" in Notepad++, select it and go to the ? -> "About Notepad++" menu. A new tab will appear where one quote will be typed out.
Good for you, but I think it reflects more poorly on your maturity that you think some funny comments on a solo project reflect the maturity level of an author so negatively or that that even matters. How many solo projects have you made with millions of users translated in 80+ languages? Given your assertion, maturity is not required for success. The author has made political statements with his work and clearly takes a more artistic approach.
Not sure about the author, but programming is most often a lonely exercise with alternating bouts of creativity and tedium. Comments like these bring out the humanity.
I love these comments. It would really make my day if I found those when trying to fix a bug a few years later.
Exactly! It makes no difference to the compiler what you call a variable, but it makes a difference to the human.
Whenever I do a pandas dataframe melt, I name the variable "melted_cheese". I could just name it something plain/boring, but life is simplybetter with melted cheese.
Agreed. A certain amount of word–play is necessary for a happy and healthy life. Sadly I once worked on a team that didn’t understand this.
I had been given the task to add an insignificant feature to a minor subsystem, and by chance the first two methods I added to my class had names that started with the letter A. I had to “ask” the user for confirmation, and I had to “authenticate” a widget. To keep myself interested, I pushed myself to continue the trend. I needed names for about six or eight methods, and the last two were the hardest. I had to lock some files to deny anyone permission to read them, and I had to record the actions taken in a database. I had the implementations written and tested, I just needed good names.
I ended up with the names “afsluiten” (literally “off–close”, or “to close off”) and “αναγράφω” (“anagrapho”, to inscribe, record, or publish). I laughed so much when I found both of them. They were perfect! I committed, pushed to a branch, wrote up a pull request, and then started a two–week vacation the next morning.
I anticipated that on my return we would all laugh at these funny names in our weekly meeting, that the team lead would request that I rename these two methods, and that I would then push to master with English names. Instead, I had a meeting with HR and the VP of Engineering about how I was mocking them, disrespecting their work, how unprofessional it was, and on and on and on. Apparently the team had been stewing on this “insult” for the whole two weeks, making it worse and worse in their minds.
I was rather sad when they fired me, but I have been so much better off ever since; the people I work with now actually know what humor is, and how to play. They can even express admiration and wonder when someone does something clever or slick. It’s like night and day.
Oh my...what an awful way to get back from vacation! It's such a shame when egos get involved like that.
I deeply appreciate that level of wordplay though! Glad it worked out for you in the end, and I hope you have continued to express true creativity in your code :)
I came across a council system for recording the holes that ultility companies dig in roads. Often a specific job would require several additional "associated" holes to be dug around the main one.
The programmer chose the filenames: "holes" and "assholes". kudos!
NB: This was MSDOS days when filenames could be a maximum of 8 characters.
I guess a lot of non-French speakers will miss the real joke: "I think therefore I am" translates to "Je pense donc je suis", which rhymes well to the parody.
Then it's not plainly immature, but somewhat elaborate.
and author of Notepad++ made an open-source project used on a massive scale
(none is obligated it to work on open source, but I consider it admirable and praiseworthy, especially if someone is doing it successfully and helping many other people)
I might be one of those boring types, but I agree. Jokes get old, source code stays. Seeing the same shit obscuring the workflow gets tiring really fast.
This kind of humour is fine to see in passing on HN, but I'd be furious if someone put it in my production code.
I'm a Notepad++ user and I'm not a fan of some of these quotes. I wonder if someone has already made a cleaned up version of Notepad++. I would certainly be interested in that.
