Slashdot Mirror

One example where unobtrusive ads exists is The Daily WTF.

I don't feel that they are denying me the target experience and therefore they can be left. The fact that they rarely interests me is a different issue, but at least they aren't up in my face annoying me.

Actually, please allow me to post the full story here since I suppose most slashdot users don't know about it.

Once upon a time there was a website called The Daily WTF, it was pretty popular. And they needed to replace their old forum with a newer one, so the owner of the website chose Discourse, because apparently he was friends with Jeff Atwood.

Now, the users in that forum tend to troll each other a lot, and they love to find bugs in crappy software (it's the whole reason for the website). They found a severe XSS vulnerability within 24 hours, and a boatload of bugs shortly after (did you know Discourse has no QA testing?). People weren't happy with the "infiniscroll", the general website slowness, the inconsistent DiscoMardownBBcdeHTML syntax, etc. They started to complain.

The Discourse team came to the forum to answer questions and monitor the "meta/bugs" category (which was collecting several bugs per day). They had some frictions with the community since Jeff Atwood's idea of "civilized discussion" is clearly different than TDWTF's (plus some members in particular love to post inflamatory comments). This went on for some time, then they left.

But the forum was still slow and crashed every other day, and people still wanted to report bugs, so they went to meta.discourse.org, the official forum and bug tracker (Bugzilla, Jira? nope, Discourse). But as I said, Jeff has his own ideas of civilized discourse, which include things like silently deleting your posts for no clear reason, so people were still unhappy. Some TDWTF forum members decided to troll him a bit, doing things like everyone using the same avatar, but nothing particularly bad (IMO). This again went on for some time.

Then disaster happened: the admin of TDWTF forums went to meta.discourse to report that two buttons were in different order in the mobile and desktop views, but he made the mistake of illustrating the desktop view with a mobile screenshot (browser set to desktop mode). Jeff replied "not a bug, desktop view on mobile is not supported". The first admin replied that this had nothing to do with the bug, you can easily reproduce it in a desktop browser. ...and in response, Jeff banned every member of TDWTF, with the only messages "sorry, you are no longer welcome here", and another Discourse developer self-banned from TDWTF with the message "Time for you to migrate off Discourse".

FileNotFound

Reminds me of tri-state logic.

http://thedailywtf.com/article...

Tis not always the right tool for the job.

This one was pretty funny; http://thedailywtf.com/article...

Protip flog is not a good password on a golf website.

Anyone who thinks that the habits in that article, are acceptable in day to day coding, is an asshole who shouldn't be allowed near a keyboard. People who do this arn't clever. They are people who just don't care about the quality of their work.

These are the habits that guarantee difficult, if not impossible, to maintain code that some poor sucker later on has to deal with, and I dare you to find one single veteran programmer who has been on the recieving end of such a monstrosity, to say otherwise.

Sometimes there may be a very good reason to use a goto, or to roll your own version of an already existing data structure. But if there is, you *damn* well better document why you did that. It doesn't matter if your code is "self documenting". If there is any reason at all that you broke convention, then you owe it to the next person down the line (who, I should add, may well be yourself a year later) to at least add a single sentence comment to explain why you did that.

How much time do you save by not explicitly typing a variable? A few seconds? You must feel so smart and efficient! Especially when you piss away 3 hours debugging a routine that did an type conversion into a result you weren't expecting?

This isn't about having perfect code. It's about sanity. It's about giving yourself and others a fighting chance when you're down to the deadline and marketing insists that these 15 additional features must be included. Having to fight your own code when you're under pressure does nothing but increase the chances of making even more mistakes, and possibly having your project showcased on http://thedailywtf.com/ as a warning to others.

They were given training in MUMPS to help them recover from the effects of JCL.

LabView is not only proprietary, it's a visual programming language (connect a bunch of boxes with lines) that stores its stuff in binary blobs. So you can't do version control on it, or even diff it. If someone changes one of those little boxes in a big LabView project, you will likely never know who did it or when it happened, and good luck finding where it was changed. Or you might not even know that it happened at all, just things start acting screwy.

In general, they don't seem to be particularly good software engineers: https://what.thedailywtf.com/t...

That article made me laugh and cry at the same time.

In general, they don't seem to be particularly good software engineers: https://what.thedailywtf.com/t...

I would really like to see VW's source code, to see if they took the care of plausible deniability. There was recently a nice contest over here.

You need both "in the box" and "out of the box" thinking. Most of the people who spend their time in research don't make any big breakthroughs, Nobel prize winners are the exceptions. Many people only produce the complicator's gloves when they try, or they suffer from NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome and wants to reinvent the wheel - poorly. The rest make the world go around, nothing wrong with an electrician wiring up a house just like he's wired up many other houses just like many electricians before him. Solid craftsmanship should not be underrated and that's what many engineers do, it might not be so glamorous to create yet another business system with workflows and reports but it's like building condo buildings, they're not exactly revolutionary but we need them. Not everything can be the Sydney Opera.

I hope you aren't the IT manager at my company. If so, I'm leaving.

There's no way I'm going to work for a company whose IT manager has such a knee-jerk and uninformed reaction. If you truly believed Linux was the right tool for the job, you would have switched well before now for numerous other reasons. And you wouldn't be recommending an EOL operating system like XP. And for that matter you wouldn't be pirating any software, because that is about as unprofessional as you can get and you put your company at serious legal risk.

You really aren't an IT manager, you would know better. Either that or you are one of the guys that tend to show up in the stories on http://thedailywtf.com/.

Obligatory DailyWTF regarding Samsung's Tizen: https://what.thedailywtf.com/t...

Shiver me timbers.

Discourse is amazing in how many WTFs it has due to the strongly-held and odd beliefs its creator has about UI design, not the least of which is continuous scrolling by inserting/removing HTML with Javascript. The best place to see these bugs and oddities exposed and discursed is in The Daily WTF forums.

Tyson, is that you??

As bad as Android is, Tizen is shittier.

Too bad it is such a dog's breakfast of half ideas.

It is indeed. Tizen is based on the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, which are apparently a dog's breakfast's breakfast. The best part is how EFL deals with pointers to various types of objects by casting them all to a typedef of void *, thereby bypassing all C type checking.

Seriously? They think they're going to take over the world with that crap?

While we're posting links to thedailywtf, let's not forget this one.

I worked on a contract in which an auto manufacturer was trying to use that abomination, and we could never even get the source to compile. Literally a year later, it came out that Samsung was trying to use both git/gerrit and Perforce as version control for it, mixed between different teams:

Time went by and Bad Things started to appear. Git/gerrit was official in some teams, but Perforce was official in other teams (even working on the same component). Some patches went there, some there. The management finally decided Perforce code should be used as THE source for building OS images. Again, they only forgot to tell everyone else to stop using git

Both repositories diverged to the point of being almost incompatible. Issues in Perforce code were given to git teams, which resulted in a litany of WTFs. After all, there’s not many things more fun than being tasked with fixing a bug in code that you physically don’t have. ASAP. Meetings took place, arrangements were made to rectify the situation. Months later, the situation is still the same.

One implication was code review process. With gerrit in place, that was a non-issue. But the Korean teams didn’t (and still don’t) understand the notion of code review and pushed everything directly to the repo. The quality of some patches was so bad that enforcing code review became top priority for non-Korean teams. Finally, a solution was developed – MS Word based code review. Each changeset needs to be attached to a bug in the tracker. Each bug can have a Word document attached with a request for code review. That document is a three pages long form with information so useless, nobody even wants to read it. At the end there’s a place for copy-pasting a diff for each file changed, with the explanation why. Reviewers are supposed to fill a Word form with details about which line they comment on and what their issue with it is.

Submitting a patch, clicking through the awful issue tracker and filling the form takes literal hours. All this because using git with gerrit was too tough. Fortunately, the review form has fields listing times taken by various steps in fixing a bug. Maybe someday someone will read how long pushing the code actually takes.

No, they won’t.

Luckily, that contract was short term. But because I put it on my resume, I got a few head-hunters inquiring about it. Quickly though, interest waned. Not hard to see why...

Your problem isn't the capacity, you have more than enough. You just need to prioritize access to the network.

That's the wrong end to start in, if removing the resource limitation is trivial that's a better solution than any resource management system, whether good or bad. At least if you're fixing this problem for you and not rolling out a resource-gobbling solution to a million devices. Before lots of applications running at the same time would trash the disk, with an SSD I just don't care since at >10000 IOPS it serves everything at once. The side effect is of course that I'm becoming more indifferent to inefficient solutions, but as long as it doesn't make a difference in practice I don't care.

I have a doctor friend who, before becoming a doctor, was a CS grad. He's in his 50's now. When I told him we hired someone from Epic Systems that knew MUMPS, he exclaimed, "They still use that?! MUMPS was going out of style back when I was an undergrad!"

Yep, and MUMPS is still used at Epic, though they call it M and claim to have made customizations and improvements to it. I was offered a job there a few years ago and they go to great expense to attract recent graduates with high starting pay (more than $84,000 in Wisconsin), unbeatable benefits including the most amazing health care plan I've seen, and a pretty cool campus.

Unfortunately it wasn't enough for me to overcome moving to Madison, working long hours, and (most importantly) becoming an expert in an all-but-dead language. When I investigated career paths at the time, the only path MUMPS offers appeared to be (1) work at Epic for a couple of years and then (2) consult for Epic's products for the rest of your career.

If you want to see the very worst 1966 has to offer today:

A Case of the MUMPS
MUMPS Madness
Revenge of MUMPS Madness!
MUMPS

It's kind of like the worst parts of COBOL, Javascript and PHP were all mixed together and then baked at 400* until charred and smoking.

I have a doctor friend who, before becoming a doctor, was a CS grad. He's in his 50's now. When I told him we hired someone from Epic Systems that knew MUMPS, he exclaimed, "They still use that?! MUMPS was going out of style back when I was an undergrad!"

Yep, and MUMPS is still used at Epic, though they call it M and claim to have made customizations and improvements to it. I was offered a job there a few years ago and they go to great expense to attract recent graduates with high starting pay (more than $84,000 in Wisconsin), unbeatable benefits including the most amazing health care plan I've seen, and a pretty cool campus.

Unfortunately it wasn't enough for me to overcome moving to Madison, working long hours, and (most importantly) becoming an expert in an all-but-dead language. When I investigated career paths at the time, the only path MUMPS offers appeared to be (1) work at Epic for a couple of years and then (2) consult for Epic's products for the rest of your career.

If you want to see the very worst 1966 has to offer today:

A Case of the MUMPS
MUMPS Madness
Revenge of MUMPS Madness!
MUMPS

It's kind of like the worst parts of COBOL, Javascript and PHP were all mixed together and then baked at 400* until charred and smoking.

I have a doctor friend who, before becoming a doctor, was a CS grad. He's in his 50's now. When I told him we hired someone from Epic Systems that knew MUMPS, he exclaimed, "They still use that?! MUMPS was going out of style back when I was an undergrad!"

Yep, and MUMPS is still used at Epic, though they call it M and claim to have made customizations and improvements to it. I was offered a job there a few years ago and they go to great expense to attract recent graduates with high starting pay (more than $84,000 in Wisconsin), unbeatable benefits including the most amazing health care plan I've seen, and a pretty cool campus.

Unfortunately it wasn't enough for me to overcome moving to Madison, working long hours, and (most importantly) becoming an expert in an all-but-dead language. When I investigated career paths at the time, the only path MUMPS offers appeared to be (1) work at Epic for a couple of years and then (2) consult for Epic's products for the rest of your career.

If you want to see the very worst 1966 has to offer today:

A Case of the MUMPS
MUMPS Madness
Revenge of MUMPS Madness!
MUMPS

It's kind of like the worst parts of COBOL, Javascript and PHP were all mixed together and then baked at 400* until charred and smoking.

When discussing stupid/nasty/unpleasant programming languages, INTERCAL and Brainf*ck typically come up. However, both of those are artificial languages designed to be unpleasant. They are jokes.

I wish MUMPS was a joke.

MUMPS makes both APL and BAFLL seem sensible. The classic DailyWTF article, A Case of the MUMPS, really explains it all. Including things like an 8 character function name limit (even C fixed that, although not before we got the "creat" system call).

MUMPS is just as bad as it sounds.

O M G

O M G

O M G

Gotta love the idea guys - http://thedailywtf.com/article...

Send an e-mail with a verification URL

How do you encrypt this unique verification URL on its way to the subscriber to your service?

security questions

I'm sorry; I misread this as "security theater questions". See "The Curse of the Secret Question" by Bruce Schneier and "Wish-It-Was Two Factor" by Alex Papadimoulis.

First law of robotics: A robot without computer vision or radar may assume that it has free agency to operate within the convex hull encompassing its range of motion (otherwise referred to as its threatened area).

Even if the robot malfunctions due to other failures, those safety cages and perimeter markings are supposed to pretty much guarantee that you'll be safe if you're standing outside them, right? In that regard, one might worry more about robots that have autonomous control and unrestricted range of motion.

It took them a long time to figure out what happened. Their sales were high because their products were being purchased by their competitors, and stored in damp warehouses, where they grew stale and moldy. Then after six months, all the accumulated rotten cigarettes were dumped onto the wholesale market --

Along with a free copy of the runaway best-seller, Who's Got The Monkey.

itappmonrobot thedailywtf 2007 http://thedailywtf.com/article...

Yes, unfortunately this is true even for the not-so-great discoveries.

They seem to focus on those apps that replace corporate drone brains. "My job is to do what the app tells me to do." So if the app tells you to fire your best customer because that's what its logic concluded, and you actually do it, who is responsible? Most likely your boss, who just yelled at you to stop bothering him and just do as the app says.

I explicitly will not hire any programmer who knows only one programming language (C and C++ count as 1 for that score.) Learning a different programming language introduces you to alternative ways to think about problems and solutions. Lisp or Scheme, Ada or Eiffel, COBOL or MUMPS, all provide a different perspective on software design, coding, test and integration.

Too many hiring managers play "buzzword bingos" in search of "flying purple unicorns," candidates whose buzzwords match their current search list. Sure, you can make a living chasing buzzwords that way, with a combination of (primarily) resume engineering and (secondarily) training. And some people who do this are actually pretty good developers. But many more don't know how to apply the technology, they're just able to produce toy programs learned from " for Idiots" who produce the stuff documented on http://thedailywtf.com/ But the people I want are those who can think creatively about a problem, using more tools than just one hammer, and who can learn new stuff on the job. What's the half-life of a technology these days, 3 years?

As has been pointed out elsewhere, the whole point of HTML is that the server says what to display, and the browser says how to display it - on the user's device. It is up to the user to zoom in or out. VT52's have been scrapped for a very long time. Specifying font sizes in pixels in CSS is strait from http://www.thedailywtf.com/.

Reminds me of this old chestnut...

Wouldn't a total re-write be the right thing to do instead?

Yes, if you can get the proper requirements. (This does not apply to the current article, since I assume that the requirements for these syscalls, etc. are well described.)

On most business systems, especially one that us written over the course of a few months, the requirements are just as spaghetti as the code, so rewriting the system from scratch might also rewriting the requirements from scratch, which is a monumental task if it already have customers with different configurations.

On a more humorous note, I find it funny that this is today's article on The Daily WTF: Seven Minutes In Heaven

Well - if you have a bit of code where you never should reach a specific point you can add a message there with an unique text string. That could be a form of easter egg, but it will provide a pretty unique message that can be searched for in case something goes wrong - like someone changing one part of the code without realizing the impact on this part of the code.

Many of us have had fun of the "This error shall never occur" and similar messages, some showing up at The Daily WTF.

You were wrong!

It's just glorified data entry. If they can type, they can program-- and the faster the better.

Just peruse http://www.thedailywtf.com/ if you need emperical evidence.

That is a neverending wealth of evidence of how badly people code.

But your argument is silly. Of course banning conditional loops is dumb. You're right A determined programmer can make hash out of any programming language. The question becomes a matter of how easy it is for Dunning-Kruger code monkeys to mutilate their code while thinking they are doing things properly.

It's about raising the bar and forcing people to think in a more structured way.

"Banning" goto is like "Banning" jaywalking. Because enough people screw it up badly enough that it is simpler to just warn against it in general.

I'd rather just be asked for a password instead of "the name of the street you grew up on." The latter, certainly, would seem at first glance to less secure than asking for a generic password

Why? You don't have to answer the question honestly!

ps. based on your internet banking ID I think you may be with HSBC. If that's the case I believe you can now change the IBxxxxxxxxxx ID to a custom username.

The more recent change in security that annoys me is that when my bank added 2-factor authentication they stopped asking for random characters from my password and just ask for the whole thing. This may reduce the risk from brute force but it increase the risk from phishing and social engineering, which I suspect is the more prevalent problem.

If you want really bad online financial security by a large organisation that should know better the UK student loans website is a hideous example of wish-it-was-two-factor authentication. Apparently asking me for a password and secret is apparently more secure than just asking me for a password! (Ignoring the effective increase in password length, it's not.) And I access it so infrequently that, before I used a decent password manager, I ended up using the reset password via email feature instead of using my password every time I wanted to log in!

captcha: mimicked

They should put the menu on a wooden table, take a picture with a film camera, scan the photograph on a flatbed scanner, then post that picture on their website.

You'd probably have been able to get away with a cheaper solution if it was the FDA approved power supply that went bad.

I had an aunt that regularly tried to get me to come to her firm to code in MUMPS.

I wonder why I never did it.

I had an aunt that regularly tried to get me to come to her firm to code in MUMPS.

I wonder why I never did it.

I had an aunt that regularly tried to get me to come to her firm to code in MUMPS.

I wonder why I never did it.