Did you mean recursion? | Hacker News Reader

Did you mean recursion?

google.com

290 points_pius50 comments

More info here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=719408

did you mean http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=719408 ?

Pfft - why would people downvote this? Come on, people...

Because it was only funny the first time

Yeah, when someone cracks a joke at a party and then someone says it again right after following a laugh, it doesn't always go so well.

Maybe the second poster just needed to be less complete... One of my high school buddies would do this (only once per audience, granted).

I would tell a joke. People would laugh. Then he would start telling the same joke, trailing off when people started looking at him funny, ending with "Well, it was funny when HE told it!"

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/936v3/can_you_s...

Ouroborus or reddit is the hated party here?

recursive, not redundant.

Whew 14 points in the hole on the snake link. Note to self, commenting is dangerous!, just submit, submit, submit... Bah, I knew there was a reason I always hated recursion (except for parsing). The negative pointage just goes to prove it.

You prick!

You got me. Nice one.

I submitted this to reddit as opposed to HN thinking it was too low-brow / off-topic for here. I suppose I was wrong!

I try to avoid taking stories from Reddit, but this merited an exception. Nice find!

Pure coincidence. I often look for definitions as a way of remembering certain keywords in text (sort of like taking mental notes).

The submission on reddit now has over 1200 upvotes which is crazy: it isn't that funny. Not to flog a dead horse, but the quality of that site really has gone down over the last two years or so.

How long before someone moans about it not performing tail call optimisation, do you reckon?

Ugh.. it doesn't do tail call optimization? What is this, Python? Scheme has had this for years and is actually required to conform to the spec! Get with it Google!

What do you mean? Do you see a dozen stack frames? It's not embedded in 10 iFrames, is it?

No, but the back button still works :]

That just means that your browser doesn't support tail recursion. Google's implementation is easily tail-call optimizable by any decent browser!

Call me crazy, but I just can't help but keep clicking that damn link, hoping to find the real Easter egg when I "blow the stack"...

Only hit the first few magic numbers so far, but I'm kinda nervous about bombing Google with too many requests in a short period of time, I doubt they look kindly on that...ah well, better things to do with my time anyhow.

They might throw you the odd CAPTCHA but apart from that I doubt they'd do anything.

What if the CAPTCHA reads "Did you mean recursion?"

I don't think you can blow the stack. They do Tail Recursion Optimization, meaning they don't maintain a stack of previous web pages since the information isn't required anymore.

Touches like this make me like Google even though I'm a Microsoft man really.

Are the two incompatible?

No, not at all. I just meant that I don't subscribe to the 'Google are brilliant, Microsoft are evil' thing that's common these days.

Understood and I totally agree! I wouldn't expect any less intellectual honesty from a HN user.

Nice easter egg.

it would be interesting to know how google manages all their little easter eggs.

Easter Bunny

Thanks for the downlinks I'll be here all day.

Each team just manages the easter eggs in their own product, it's not like there is the Easter Egg Department which has goals for the quarter of x new easter eggs reaching y million people.

So in this case it's the same team that handles all the "did you mean" stuff.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/450906315/sizes/o/

After clicking on it a few times, it should say "did you mean 'stack overflow'?

Someone took the time to make this joke, but it doesn't make the search engine work any better for me. I like it when I find easter eggs in video games. I don't like it when I find easter eggs in tools I use for work.

edit: Since I'm yelling anyway, Google's highly-corporate, brand-spanning, massive April Fools jokes leave a bad taste in my mouth.

This is also the most annoying thing about Wolfram Alpha; except with Alpha it's easier to find easter eggs than the data you wanted.

If they would have iframed 10 search result pages embedded within themselves it would have even been cooler.

Yeah, it would have made more sense. All I see here is an infinite loop.

Look at the URL it changes after every click.

The results change a bit every once in a while, too, but that may just be some internal pseudo-randomness in the search results algorithm, I'm not sure.

Keep clicking and let us know if you see it unwind.

Infinite loops are a form of recursion.

I like. I'd also be really impressed if this wasn't an intentional easter egg, but was an emergent property of the "did you mean" feature itself.

git branch --no-m 2>&1 | head -n 1

that's witty.

nice thought.

Thanks for sharing. Great find.

It boggles my mind that anyone is impressed by such trivial things.

Why? It's clever and it symbolizes Google's bubbly, geeky corporate personality. If I had to decide between working at two otherwise equal companies, I'd happily choose the one that encourages this type of playfulfulness. Small things like this matter a lot.

It is not clever. It's an old, old joke.

http://www.ehow.com/how_2049834_keep-idiot-busy.html

I bet you're a blast at parties.

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