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Comment by fnordian_slip | Hacker News Reader

Just in case someone needs the reference, the onion uses '"no way to prevent this" says only nation where this regularly happens' as a reoccurring article at every major school shooting[0], to highlight the frequency of such events and the fact that nothing has really changed since the last one.

[0] https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-na...

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I find the Wikipedia article also a good summary of the "joke" and is quite chilling to read.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_...

This is also an ongoing series on that blog, if you look at previous entries there's lots with the same title, also about C having buffer overflows

https://xeiaso.net/shitposts/no-way-to-prevent-this/

Generated by exactly 69 lines of Go every time: https://github.com/Xe/site/blob/main/cmd/no-way-to-prevent-t...

Kudos for faithfully reproducing the joke then.

Thanks, I've had thoughts about making it a bit more elaborate (possibly involving large language models somehow to help synthesize what's going on into the right format, and so that it's not literally the same thing every time), but there's a charm in making it literally the same thing every time with the details swapped out. It points out the repetition to the level that all you need to do is swap out the details next time. This is all so preventable, but sometimes these things just happen and there's not anything anyone can do about them.

Didn't catch that, thanks!

The oversimplification is part of the joke.

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