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tl;dr

Ha! I think the people who downvotted this didn't realize that "mjd" is Mark Jason Dominus aka the guy who wrote the blog post.

Even then, the post adds no value to the discussion, so it deserves downvotes anyway. Its a great blog post, and I upvoted it, but its a bad comment, and I downvoted it.

Sure it does. It says that mjd is on HN, and reading this article's comments at least enough to post this, and that he has a sense of humor.

I'm sure if someone so desired, they could ask a specific question regarding the story either in reply to the root comment or as a root comment and expect it may be seen by the author, and possibly get a reply.

I think the quality of the other responses to the parent indicates exactly how likely that is. A whole subtree full of gray comments.

Maybe I'm just getting old.

Indeed. There's no place for humour on HN.

tl;dr - A very long, difficult, and complex calculation multiplied by zero is zero. Or in this case, a very long, difficult, and complex database manipulation culminated in an invariant "Call 1-800-555-5555".

Somehow reminds me of a co-worker wandering into my cube with a dazed look, mumbling "I just ran an 8-hour database job with the wrong data...I just wasted $64,000...".

Yes, I had this impression once.

It's like a very long function that returns nothing and has no side effects.

It looks like mjd is the author of the linked post.

lol

I'm sorry.

The grandparent is the author of the post.

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