Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

Someone on StackOverflow suggested we think of ugly Java class names as poetry; he provided an example:

  InternalFrame InternalFrame

  Title Pane,

  Internal Frame

  Title Pane.
  
  
  Maximize Button Window,

  Not Focused State.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1697215/what-is-your-favo...

View on HN

I tend to prefer Lawrey's 2009 edition of this poem, which, I feel, has a more defined meter:

http://stackoverflow.com/a/891589

Steve Yegge has written Java poetry before: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom...

The link now goes to a Page Not Found page. "removed from Stack Overflow for reasons of moderation"

Welcome to stack overflow! Censorship here is just as bad, if not worse, than Wikipedia. As much as I despise this, it probably does make it a better resource. Still, I wish they would MOVE these to meta exchange, rather than deleting content outright.

Yes! Even a "Trash Exchange" where all moderated posts are dumped instead of deleted would be an improvement.

Wow! Could you elaborate by chance? I mean this genuinely, this is my first ever dead link for StackExchange content. The others in this comment thread act as if this is the norm, which is disheartening. Is this a recent phenomenon or something that I've just been luck/naive enough to miss this whole time?

There isn't much to elaborate on. Anything that doesn't fit completely within their strict no-fun-allowed guidelines gets removed. This leads to two things:

1. Any result on google from StackOverflow is guaranteed to be of the highest quality.

2. I am never ever posting there.

Sounds like a win win. There are hundreds of places for humor on the Internet. I'm pretty happy SO sticks with business. Humor would be distracting and irritating.

Why not Humor Overflow, where people can discuss what is funny and why, or why something isn't funny. Maybe why something is no longer funny -- or is funny in one language or culture, but not another.

Perhaps it is just the front-end issues I use SO for, but generally the top Google results aren't the most helpful for me; they're just the oldest and had, at one time, the most traction. Given the rate at which things change or other methods fare better, I've started sorting my results by date instead of relevancy and hoping Random Dude's Blog has the right answer. Sometimes you'll get lucky and someone will have posted an updated response, but it's still sitting at the bottom of the page with 0 votes, and my account doesn't have the reputation (due in part to not wanting my posts removed) to upvote them. Quite a cycle.

It's not a dead link per se. Users with high enough reputation can still see it. But for the web at large, it is dead, indeed.

Many questions from the early days of SO were closed because they were too humourous or didn't fit the “needs an objectively correct answer” – this included a lot of such “poll” questions like “What is your favourite ...?”.

I doubt that it makes SO a better resource. I've seen the CV patrols in action. These are teenage kids hanging out in chatrooms, gaining enough rep to close-vote (which is easier than you think) and then throwing themselves like hungry mobs on interesting questions to shut them down.

The moderation system on stackoverflow is broken because an unskilled user can gain high reputation by getting upvotes from other unskilled users (I've seen a lot of wrong answers getting up-votes). This means that over time the average level of skill in the people moderating the site drops and you end up with a lower quality of moderation.

Just an anecdote that probably says more about me than about the internet:

Recently I had work on a shell script that used "sed" to make changes in config files. At some point a change only had to happen once a line with a certain string had been seen, so I googled for this situation.

Multiple StackOverflow answers were at the the top of the results as well a several other sites all of them containing incomprehesible examples of line noise. Half the time, the comments on the pages with the aformentioned examples also indicated the solutions didn't work.

So I did a "man sed" looking for examples but it was a pretty short man page which told me to peruse "info sed". Not expecting much I fired up info (which I generally try to avoid: just put your docs in the man page) and to my surprise there was very good and clear documentation on sed which got me to fix my initial problem in 5 minutes in a clear way (well, it did need a comment in the code).

The next time I need to know anything about sed I will check the manual first.

RTFM is always the first thing to do. It's not always sufficient but it often is.

Stack Printer has a copy:

  http://www.stackprinter.com/export?question=1697215&service=stackoverflow

But you cannot link to individual answers there, sadly. It's the second one, though.

I still can see it from here (Europe).

SO users with 10k+ reputation can still see deleted questions.

I don't have any. But now it's gone. It got served out of a stale cache, I guess.

A tip I've read here on HN, use chache:URL on google to see the cached version.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&safe=...

    InternalFrame InternalFrame

We should be able to make this fit with "Silver Bells."

I just woke up my girlfriend by singing this to her. I am a terrible person.

I'm going to be singing Java class names for the next week because of this.

'Close your eyes, lend me your hand,.. darling'

Oh, is this painting (painting) / An internal fraaaaame

Yes. Definitely much more poetic than the counterparts found in Rails: https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/master/activerecord/lib/...

I keep seeing 'PaintContext' as 'PainContext'.

yes. and pane rhymes with pain as well :D

I love you.

Someone on StackOverflow suggested we think of ugly Java class names as poetry

Vogon poetry, to be specific.

Don't Panic. just put your towel over your ears!!!

worth rewatching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrIrcV9Bgmc

yes. sometimes i feel as if i need special restraints built into my desk chair to properly "appreciate" the java code i am required to read and debug.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com