Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikewarot | Hacker News Reader

0x08675309 also shows up fairly often.

When I worked on Windows Phone during the good ol' days, my team used this for a sort of retail mode assert, for situations that really shouldn't happen. Instantly recognizable. The definition went something like this:

// This is a shout out to that 80s hit. You know the one.

#define E_JENNY_JENNY_WHO_CAN_I_TURN_TO 0x88675309

The 1 in bit 31 was required to signify that it's a Win32 error code. The other high bits are essentially a namespace, which we used correctly for all our other error codes.

It's far better than constants like NEVER_USE_OR_MODIFY_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED that are supposedly for testing only but turn out to be used in production to control whether a beta feature appears or not, and so lead to a bunch of dead code that couldn't really be cleanly disentangled from good production code without someone familiar with it doing a diff review.

Wherever my Motorola MPx200 went, it says "Hello."

Does that mean anything?

If you're a child of the 80's in North America it does!

(Do a google search on the number, without the 0x0 prefix...)

Pop song in the 80s, 867-5309 (Jenny)

It's a reference to a song ("867-5309 / Jenny") by Tommy Tutone. It's pretty dated by now.

Dated?!

DATED?!

BLASPHEMY!

;-)

Dated, just like putting noses to smileys!

iOS speech-to-text spells "smiley face" with a nose.

FWIW! :)

I feel older every day.

Better than not getting any older!

[Citation Needed]

Crap. I used to think being alive was better than being dead. But come to think of it, the only ones complaining are the ones who are still alive. I’m conflicted now.

It's as old now as the first Jazz concert at Carnegie hall was to it. Fred Astaire's "Nice Work if You Can Get It" was #24 on the charts that year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938_in_music

It was fun to read about this in the North American Numbering Plan documentation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com