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Comment by nullhole | Hacker News Reader

Don't have much to add except to mention again that the magic number for TIF is 42, and it's 42 because of the meaning of 42:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210108174645/https://www.adobe...

  Bytes 2-3
  An arbitrary but carefully chosen number (42) that further identifies the file as a TIFF file

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And here is the author himself confirming that in the Wikipedia talk page for TIFF! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:TIFF/Archive_1#h-Source_f...

Great find! And oh no, it’s complete with the customary blissfully unaware user replying to say he’s wrong!

Hindsight is 20/20 and I loved TFA and I don't want to ruin it but... that comment was there from 2007 and the Wikipedia user bio was pretty clear since the beginning (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Scarlsen&old...)

Yes but it's not easy to find random Wikipedia user pages, or even find the specific talk page comment in the archives without knowing what to look for. Go ahead, find a friend, give them no clues, and see if they find it.

Yes but the author was specifically investing over this, had a clue on a similar name and even edited the same page himself.

I don't know what “investing over” means, but all I can say is (repeating myself): try it with a friend, without giving them the benefit of hindsight.

(Very few visitors to a Wikipedia page read its talk page, very few of them will further look at the archives of the talk page, let alone read every single comment and its corresponding commenter's name, and in this case as soon as the author knew the spelling to look for, the rest was straightforward for them.)

well said svat. without laboring the point, "once you know - you know". until then it is like trying to find a needle in a haystack - and some people do not want to be found.

I mean that the author was literally writing a book about this and literally conducting an investigation about who was the real author of the TIFF spec. He interviewed other people about it, he had a name that had a typo in it, he even found a white-on-white line in a PDF with the real name. He was clearly putting effort into the research.

We are humans, everybody can miss things, I mentioned "hindsight is 20/20" but still, it was in the Wikipedia discussion page for the TIFF article all the time. It's a matter of fact and some random HNer found it in minutes/hours.

I repeat myself, it was probably better that he didn't found that out and went to write a hand-written letter to the alleged author's home address, it created a much deeper human bond, which is especially meaningful since Stephen Carlsen passed away not much later.

thanks darkwater

And interestingly, the person he replies to is taviso [0][1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=taviso

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tavis_Ormandy

(Also: 42 is the answer to everything because it's the ascii code for *).

Was that a happy coincidence or intentional?

Perfectly pure happiness:

"The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42 will do' I typed it out. End of story." from the man himself[1]

...but let us not ruin a good story with the truth. Remember why earth was built. The "real" answer might then be flowing in the ether.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrases_from_The_Hitchhiker%27...

I think it was intentional but I don't have a source.

Edit: from the other comment, it appears it was in fact random...

> the ASCII code for h

Umm. The ASCII code for h is 102 ;)

I don't know why or how you're seeing an h? I'm talking about the asterisk.

I could be wrong but the winky face leads me to believe theyre referencing the hunter2 password meme

Ah, thanks! I wasn't familiar with this meme. It is funny.

Are talk pages accepted as a source for the same article?

Talk pages aren’t valid sources in general. In this case the author is dead and an established expert having published in the field, so I guess it’s fine, but I wouldn’t bet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#Self-p...

42 even shows up in the late mr. Carlsen's obituary. [1]

[1]https://www.mountainviewtacoma.com/obituaries/stephen-carlse...

I remember Steve.

42 is an extremely non-special number. Does anyone know if it appeared in the CS field before Douglas Addams "invented" it?

What do you mean, non-special? 42 is the magic constant of the smallest non-trivial magic cube.

It’s also an integer. Who ch I pretty special when you consider that most numbers in nature are real.

I have yet to see a number in nature.

Nature is full of them.

But they're real, right? Or is too complex to just say so?

There isn’t a fraction of me which didn’t appreciate that comment

*was

Based on the same algorithm as https://xkcd.com/221/

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