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Comment by jojobas | Hacker News Reader

Yet the top answer is "this is gibberish". Go figure.

> Yet the top answer is "this is gibberish"

They're not wrong really. It is gibberish on it's own. We don't know where in memory that it starts or the places it is referencing in the jumps. If it were ASM source code those jumps would likely contain labels instead of just raw dogging memory locations.

The fact that it just so happens to be from COMMAND.COM from MS-DOS 3 is a wonderful bit of detective work, but it doesn't make the snippet any less gibberish.

No it is not "gibberish". Gibberish would be a stream of invalid opcodes, zeros and FFs. The code is incomplete, true, but it easily deducable what it is doing. The only thing that looks strange is IRET, but not entirely misplaced.

By that definition, any language I don't speak is gibberish, and yet if someone asked me "what does 'Je n'ai pas mangé depuis six jours' mean", replying that it's gibberish is obviously wrong.

Seems to me, your comment presumes a certain completeness on the part of the utterance/code snippet that isn't necessarily given.

That's not really a good comparison, no. The code snippet is more comparable to a sentence fragment, which more often than not is "gibberish".

For example, taken out of its original context, this sentence fragment from your comment is meaningless:

"that definition, any language"

Well the top answer was written 3 days ago, the correct one 3 hours ago. Give it some time.

It was just as confidently incorrect then as it is now.

I agree, why did they even say it if it was never correct?

It looks correct to me?

Well it wasn't, as established by the parent parent parent ... comment.

I disagree with it.

You disagree that the code belonged to MS-DOS 3.30 COMMAND.COM?

Nope. I just think that going “this seems like it was just some randomly chosen bit of real code” is an accurate description of the snippet.

Welcome to StackExchange?

well, it sort of is gibberish. it starts in the middle of a system call, omitting to state not only the system call's arguments but even which system call to invoke; that's no way to write a program

Yeah

The code is not gibberish, but the way it was put there, missing information, etc, makes it so

yeah, exactly

And likely will remain the "accepted" answer, unless who made the question comes bothers to come back to it.

This is a huge problem with SO, the person making the question is not usually the most qualified to decide and they usually won't come back to check for further answers.

One of many reasons I stopped answering a long time ago.

Actually, the best answer was written by the question poster himself. Who is probably still not going to mark it as accepted out of a misguided sense of politeness.

They said they don't think their answer is best because the question was "What does it do" not, "Where is it from".

That's an excuse. The real reason is to avoid drama by withdrawing Internet points. Some people can be very salty about this.

well lets see what happens when they train a llm on all this ”knowledge”.. oh wait

That's why "accepted answer" isn't supposed to be treated as "best answer", but just "answer that helped the asker" (and, yeah, often it's the blind leading the blind).

IIRC they recently changed the default sorting of answers to not always put the accepted one first to try to help with that common misconception.

Isn't it stack overflow wisdom by now to always look for the second or third answer?

It is not on stackoverflow.

It's the same perverse FGITW mechanics though. Worse even, given that the RC site did not implement the change of unpinning accepted answers. Also it's regularly subject to herd voting from Hot Network Questions visitors.

stackexchange = stackoverflow

Go and upvote the real answer below that one.

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