Haskell Researchers Announce Discovery of Industry Programmer Who Gives a Shit

Haskell Researchers Announce Discovery of Industry Programmer Who Gives a Shit

Haskell researcher Dutch Van Der Linde explained how they had stumbled on the theoretical possibility of Briars and his persistent interest in Haskell. "We knew that there are precisely 38 people who give a shit about Haskell," said Van Der Linde, "because every Haskell-related reddit post gets exactly 38 upvotes. It's a pure, deterministic function of no arguments -- that is, the result is independent of what we actually announce. But there are only 37 of us on our mailing list, so we figured there was a lurker somewhere."

"That, or it was an off-by-1 error not detectable by our type system," Van Der Linde added. "But we don't, uh, like to dwell on, I mean with good unit testing practices we can, um... sorry, I need to get some water."

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11 Responses:

  1. boinkor.net/ says:

    Shouldn't this come with the doooooomed tag, as well?

    • antifuchs says:

      Oddly enough, using OpenID let me post the above comment without me providing a name / email.

      • jwz says:

        Yeah, I think that's how it's supposed to work, since openID is supposed to provide both of those. But it doesn't seem to have done so. I guess the text could be clearer.

        • antifuchs says:

          Yeah, I clicked Post hoping that the system either fills in the missing data from my openid profile, or it errors out because there are required values missing. Seems it chose to do neither (-:

          • oinker.net says:

            I shouldn't be surprised: OpenID failed to pull my Gravatar image but it DID show my WordPress information, see below. Crud.

            But thank you, I did learn something. I will insert in the name field, rather than leaving it blank for OpenID to fill as it sees fit, and not even worry about hover over!

            (If I can't be boinkor.net, I'll be ...)

  2. Yay, a new Yegge post! Also, testing OpenID on the new blog.

    • Huh, it is always interesting to see what different sites will or won't pick up from the OpenID server. At least it looks like this one lets you override the name if you don't like the (wrong) one it picked.

  3. However, it does display a hover-over that is the same as the preceding comment, along with a photo. Which meant that I had to try doing it too. Wonder if I'll have boinkor.net hover as well?

    • jwz says:

      I have only the barest understanding of how OpenID works or how it is configured. I'd like to change it so that when I log in elsewhere with this blog as my OpenID it shows my actual name instead of "jwz.org", but I can't see where you set that in WordPress.

      Does OpenID imply the use of Gravatar, or is there a way for the OpenID data to send an icon back too?

      • OpenID is extensible, but so far as I can tell there is no current support for any icon extension. Gravatar is really straightforward: if your blog supports Gravatar, and people provide an email address with their comments, then the blog software should go and grab any associated icon from the Gravatar site.

        The problem here is presumably that WordPress (either the core or whatever plugins handle comments) treats name+email comments and OpenID comments completely differently to one another. In the true Unix tradition, it's almost certainly best to simply leave this as half-working for the time being and assuming that, as time passes and you upgrade the backend software, it will suck less, as hacking around it yourself only assures you of further problems in the future.

        - Chris

  4. Edouard says:

    Yay! Steve Yegge!

    Loved this:
    MacFarlane concluded, "Our elegant approach didn't work, so we hired a Perl hacker"

    (Boy - this OpenID thing is a complete mindfuck of fail so far for me)