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Comment by kevinmgranger | Hacker News Reader

For additional context: this was the winning entry in the SCP's Short Works Contest[1]. The idea was: can you make a good SCP entry in under 500 words? Bonus points if it's under 237 words, the length of the first ever entry.

Of course, the entry with zero words won.

[1]: http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/short-works-contest

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browsed the site for a few min, understood nothing

The SCP Foundation is a fictional wiki describing paranormal objects or entities (each labeled SCP-##), written from the perspective of the "SCP Foundation", SCP standing for Secure, Contain, Protect. Each page describes a new object, research done on the SCP, and containment protocols.

It's a fun read and easy to get sucked down a rabbithole

SCP also stands for "Secure Containment Procedure" when used in the context of a numbered SCP, as distinct from the SCP foundation.

I really like this from the idea of conveying information - the containment requirements come first as they're most important. It's a useful thing to think about when writing and email. Also really like it as a global collaborative writing project.

Seems like that's a common thread for 'shortest X' contents, like that 0-byte IOOCC entry.

What's IOOCC (no Google results), and what was that entry? Could you link to it?

They probably meant to say "IOCCC," the International Obfuscated C Code Contest and they're referring I think to this entry:

https://www.ioccc.org/years.html#1994_smr

Wow, that Makefile rule...

    smr: smr.c
        @${RM} -rf smr
        ${CP} smr.c smr
        ${CHMOD} +x smr

why the "wow"? Looks ok to me.

Copy a .c file to an executable is definitely not ok, normally you'd call the compiler here.

It only works because it is a very special c file.

It's a misspelling of IOCCC - international obfuscated C coding competition.

Does misspelling count as obfuscation?

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