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Comment by sikhnerd

10 years ago

The page source has a nice gem:

  <!--
  So this guy we just interviewed at my
  current job wrote this little script
  to see if a product update for some 
  company had come out. Every 10 seconds
  the script urllib'ed the page, checked
  the length of the html - literally
  len(html) - against the length it was
  last time it checked. He wrote a blog
  post about this script. A freaking
  blog post. He also described himself
  as "something of a child prodigy"
  despite, in another post, saying he
  couldn't calculate the area of a slice
  of pizza because "area of a triangle 
  with a curved edge is beyond my 
  Google-less math skills." Seriously 
  dude? I haven't taken geomtry in 20 
  years, and pi*r^2/8 seems pretty 
  freaking obvious.

  The script also called a ruby script
  to send him a tweet which another 
  script was probably monitoring to text
  his phone so he could screenshot the 
  text and post to facebook via 
  instagram.

  I think the "millenials" - who should
  be referred to as generation byte - get
  undeserved flak, as all generations do,
  for being younger and prettier and 
  living in a different world.

  But this kid calling himself a prodigy
  is a clear indication of way too many
  gold stars handed out for adequacy, so
  to ensure that no such abominable
  script ever does anything besides 
  bomb somebody's twitter account, this
  comment shows up exactly 50% of the 
  time, and I encourage others to do 
  the same.
  -->

my favorite:

/*

Yeah, there's some shitty code here. There are some things that shouldn't be done. I did them. Sometimes, I had my reasons. Sometimes, I was just being lazy. But guess what? You're sitting there reading the source on some guy's blog. So fuck you.

*/

In case anyone goes searching the source for this comment right away before reading it the whole way through on Hacker News, it says at the bottom that it will only show up 50% of the time, so if you don't see it the first time, keep refreshing the page until it shows up in the source.

To discover, in his very own incredibly pretentious words, the subject of this mini-rant, or in case you suffer from some lingering uncertainty that the contemptuous tone of same is merited, please hie thyself to http://marc-w.com/, where you'll find his blog, which I swear to God is actually called "Programming Awesome".

And, yes, of course I realize it's a bit rich for me to call anyone pretentious, but really. If he were even remotely sympathetic, I'd be embarrassed on his behalf. As it is, I'm just sort of uncomfortably amused, the way you might be when someone you don't really like has just publicly wet himself and failed to notice.

Are you sure that's in the source for the blog post? Because I don't actually see it in there, I searched for "so this guy" and "interviewed" too.

  • The comment appears randomly 50% of the time. Try refreshing the page 10 times and check the code every time, you will have a 1023/1024 chance to see it.

  • Why did I get a downvote? Seriously, when I searched "So this guy we just interviewed" in the page source, I didn't get any results. Did I miss something?