Comments on: Comments on 3467

Post number 3467

plinth — Fri, 29 Sep 2000 13:57:17 -0800

How to care for you brand new hacker. [via memepool. Quicktime movie, 3.1M. Astoundingly accurate.

By: dithered

dithered — Fri, 29 Sep 2000 14:11:55 -0800

How odd. The hacker from the movie sits 80 feet away. The guy who plays his boss sits 6 feet away. No shit.

By: Dean_Paxton

Dean_Paxton — Fri, 29 Sep 2000 21:09:24 -0800

This is my life, I'll send this to my boss now.... thanks.

By: dhartung

dhartung — Fri, 29 Sep 2000 22:21:40 -0800

Heh. Be forewarned, despite the URL, this is not humorous. Tongue-in-cheek, to be sure, but it's accurate enough to be taken seriously. Should probably be played for bosses everywhere. I'm not sure they'll all be happy with the part on playing games on company time, though ... (dithered, so where do you work?)

By: circumstance

circumstance — Fri, 29 Sep 2000 23:42:28 -0800

Cute, but kind of retarded... I dont know anyone who starts a list with a 0. Do you?

By: cCranium

cCranium — Sat, 30 Sep 2000 09:28:59 -0800

0) well, there's me. 1) there's everyone else I work with... :-) Actually, that's not completely true, most of the people I work with were weaned on VB, and are used to 1-based array systems. Old Skool hackers, and us youngin's who learned about Old Skool hackers from various ESR literature though, we tend to count from 0 a lot. Admitedly mostly when discussing programming issues, and almost never around non-programmers. While we may be socially stunted, many of us do realise that a lot of people have no idea what the hell we're talking about. :-) A link to the text the movie was based on.

By: circumstance

circumstance — Sat, 30 Sep 2000 11:33:57 -0800

hm.. I am trying to learn programming now, maybe all hope is lost? I can understand that while the computer, compiler, whatever, starts with zero, humans start counting with one. Does that mean I can never be an ace programmer? Should I quit now?

By: Satapher

Satapher — Sat, 30 Sep 2000 11:50:14 -0800

That was stupid.

By: Mars Saxman

Mars Saxman — Sat, 30 Sep 2000 12:23:11 -0800

That was so reasonable it was hardly funny. I guess it would be funny to someone barely familiar with hackers, but just enough to catch the references. circumstance: learning to count from zero instead of one is like learning to think of A through F as digits, or like learning how to convert between signed and unsigned values. You don't have to start out thinking that way; it just happens over time. Everybody starts out with their little hex charts and does all this crazy shifting and multiplication to figure the numbers out (or they just punch it into a base converter program), but after a couple years of that you just see the patterns and understand them. Have no fear, you'll be one of us in time. :-) While we may be socially stunted, many of us do realise that a lot of people have no idea what the hell we're talking about. :-) Isn't that the fun of it? You can be talking about linked list traversal, for chrissakes, and people look at you like you're brilliant simply because they can't figure out what you mean. -Mars

By: dhartung

dhartung — Sat, 30 Sep 2000 12:43:15 -0800

Ah, thanks, cCranium -- I knew I'd heard those lines before.

By: dithered

dithered — Sat, 30 Sep 2000 18:18:43 -0800

The hacker, the boss, and I work here.

By: daveadams

daveadams — Mon, 02 Oct 2000 09:47:07 -0800

Actually, cCranium, the latest versions of Visual Basic use zero as the first array index. It was always an option, though, even in old old BASICs I used back in the early 80s. "option base 0" or "option base 1" I recall. The default was 1. I'm not sure when it switched, but I can verify that Visual Basic 6 and VBScript properly start arrays at zero! :)

By: cCranium

cCranium — Mon, 02 Oct 2000 10:30:56 -0800

daveadams: I did not know that! Hrm. I suppose I should start paying attention to my VBS arrays then... circumstance: you just have to wrap your head around the fact that what "normal people" refer to as 1, is actually the 2nd integer. It'll make sense. :-)